Please vacate the premises...

It's been really rainy for a few days here in west central Florida. Yesterday I took advantage of a lull in the raininess to spread annual rye grass seed on the lawn. Florida grass is pretty awful, but we can have several months of lush green if we overseed with rye in the winter.

While passing the little pond at the bottom of the back stairs a snakeskin caught my eye. Normally I'm not a snake phobe... but this year we saw two water moccasins... killing one, with the other slithering away. Water moccasins... yeah - a little bit of a phobia, especially with a baby in the house.

I took the snakeskin out of the water thinking
"Please not a water moccasin... Please not a water
moccasin" but accepting it very possibly was.
It looks relatively puny curled up, but measured
about 24 inches with the measuring tape.


Yup... it's that skinny black line under the tape.
It doesn't look intimidating at all..

The skin was all stuck together (and smelly!) so
it was hard to get a good idea of what the snake
looked like who shed it. I pondered how I could
fill the snakeskin to see its true shape and other
characteristics. Upstairs, on my glass table on the deck, I used a watering can with a thin nozzle to fill the snakeskin with water.

I was a bit surprised when it worked!
Yes... lots of leakage, but the snakeskin
filled enough to give a much better view
of who had left it there... unhappily...
it looks like it was a water moccasin.

Doubly unhappily...
the shed skin is proof it's growing.