Nothing Like Coming Home

I'm going to interrupt our little journey in Switzerland with a short tale so I don't forget. The second day that we were home, Pietro and Amedeo went out in the backyard to play. Pietro came in to tell me that he found two snakes tangled in our fence near the garage. We have a plastic mesh attached to the top of our fence to keep the cats inside and safe. These dumb snakes squeezed themselves into the holes until they got stuck. I went out to investigate. The first thing I noticed was the stench. If you have never smelled decomposing body, you won't have any trouble recognizing it for the first time, believe me! Ew.

Ok...so the snakes are dead. We'll deal with it later. I made lunch, put Amedeo down for his nap. Pietro and I sat down to drink coffee. Remembering the smell, I told Pietro that we needed to take the snakes down ASAP. He agreed and headed outside. A few minutes later, he came back in with the news: only one of the snakes was dead. He informed me that it was a very much alive nonvenomous black rat snake.

I felt pretty sorry for the snake since he had to sit there while his snake-friend kicked the bucket right next to him. I trotted outside with some scissors. My plan was to cut the fence down with the snake still twisted in it, then I could snip around until he was free. The part where I cut him down worked well. He landed in the bucket just fine. The scissors wound up being too dull and thick to clip the tightly bound mesh. I had to use my good embroidery scissors with a sharp point. Pietro pinned our guy down with a stick as I snipped away. I had difficulty seeing exactly what I was doing, so Pietro started snipping instead.

The more netting we cut off our snake, the better he felt. He started thrashing around, flashing his big mouth at us. It was hot outside and both of us were sweating. Pietro finally got the last bit of fence off of him when the snake popped out of the bucket and sat on the grass. He kept a close eye on us, following every move we made. I wanted to move him away from the house and down into the woods. I got a broom and swept him towards the overturned bucket. Pietro carried the bucket down the slope using the broom to keep the snake inside.

I'd say it took about an hour to rescue the dumb snake. I had to wonder if I was messing with Darwin's survival of the fittest.

Next...more pictures from our trip!