Today at the fountain …
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Hee hee. That’s the kind of pattern that always makes me do a double and triple take before I say, Oh hi nice rodent-eater!
In my actual yard the large snakes are black and don’t startle me that way. Unless I see one of the really long ones who startle me just by instinct, but I love them. The copperheads are on back in my woods, so patterns do take me a second because it could always be a copperhead here.
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Just read that one way to distinguish poisonous snakes from non is by the eyes. Poisonous snakes don’t have round pupils.They are up and down squinty vertically narrow, and have pits just below the eyes. This snake has round pupils and no pits. Otherwise, I would of thought rattlesnake!
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We can all appreciate that!
I personally don’t want to look a snake in the eye…
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The heads are usually more triangular, too. I thought I was literally staring down a baby copperhead once and still forgot to look at the eyes, lol. Its head wasn’t badly triangular, and it was in fact a baby black snake. I didn’t know they were so patterned when really little.
I was sitting down and it was in my boots in front of me! It really was eye-to-eye.
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40 years ago I was hiking in the Trinity wilderness and sat down for a snack. After a few minutes the hair on the back of my neck started rising and I looked across the trail to see a large timber rattler staring right at me. To my relief it was not coiled but just stretched out alongside some bushes. I slowly moved on … 
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As a young girl I was fishing and felt something on my ankle. I looked down and there was this huge snake writhing about my foot. I could not see it’s head…it was underneath my foot. . I took off one direction and my dad said the snake hit the water as fast as it could. Neither of us wanted to remain in that situation!
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Check out the orange sashes along the back. It appears to be the catepiller of an ordinary butterfly – but you can find out for certain here: Welcome to BugGuide.Net! - BugGuide.Net
To many urban people here in our neighborhood, squirrels are wildlife! Oy!
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