Sorry for the canned response.

...that doesn't necessarily mean that you're smart.

If a gator doesn't get you, a water moccasin will. Happens surprisingly often.

Also, some people let their little dogs near the canals and are amazed when a gator pops out, rolls, and gets them. Some fool with the birds, and the birds go for the eyes. I guess everyone coming into Florida needs a handbook or something on how to avoid dangers.

Gators are apparently fond of them.

Last fall my husband was hiking in a park outside of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He has a habit of picking up litter as he hikes - he saw a can off the path in the bushes and reached for it. Then he realized what he had thought was a pile of leaves was a copper head!



He snapped this photo, then used his walking stick to pull the can away from the snake to where he could pick it up safely.

As he hiked out, he warned several other hikers, including a family with children, about the copper head so they would not surprise it and have an unpleasant encounter.

Where I'm from (the deep deep infra-red Floriduh panhandle), one doesn't just go out weeding the flowerbeds in the morning without poking around with a hoe to persuade whatever's in there to move along. Copperheads aren't aggressive but they're slow to slither away compared to other snakes. A bite to the arm (close to the heart) could be really dangerous if you're not near a hospital.

In the 90's I had a sailboat docked in a marina on Lake Lanier, 45 minutes north of Atlanta. One day, a new boat-neighbor moved into a slip near ours and I learned that she'd moved from another dock on the lake after being bitten by a water moccasin two months earlier. She'd dropped something off the dock and reached down to retrieve it. Ouch.

But I've never seen a copperhead except in displays.

The time I stepped on the moccasin, I was running full tilt around the swampy lake next to our house. I felt something soft under foot, looked back and there was the snake. I didn't slow down!

One summer day while my family was swimming in the clearer lake my grandmother lived on, my Dad called to all us kids to just tread water quietly. He'd spotted a moccasin swimming between us and shore. If we'd panicked and tried to get back to shore, the snake probably would have bitten one of us. Since we let the snake go on his way, we all made it out safely.

Here on our farm in Leon County, we've had rattlers but not copperheads or moccasins - though there probably are moccasins down in our bottom thirty acres where the pond and swamp are. The house and barns are on a clay ridge so the habitat is very different.

But then he knows how to react around wildlife.