Found this little eastern worm snake adrift at “sea” on my pool thermometer and airlifted it to shore. It must have entered fight, flight, or freeze mode, poor thing, because it was a good 10 minutes before it departed its makeshift raft.

PS, I do have escape platforms for critters in the pool but the dumdums never seem to use them. Then again, I’m obviously not getting to meet the ones that did find and use them.

PPS, I can’t get over how teeny this little one is! I’m experiencing some acute cute aggression!

  • stupidcasey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    This reminds me of a nightmare / trauma I had as a kid:

    We lived on a farm and so we had these old rugs that worms would live under whenever we wanted to go fishing we would pull up a rug and there would be 10-15 worms under a single rug a nifty trick but we also had plenty of snakes that we would run into from time to time, they would get in the chicken coop and eat the eggs and chickens or live in birds nests or just swim along the creek we fished in but anyway the irrational fear was I would pick up a rug grab a hand full of worms put them in my pocket for fishing (it’s irrational because who stores works in there pocket??) and not notice my uncle told us that you don’t actually feel the snakes bite you (probably a lie idk) so I would assume I would just be walking along and slowly die from snake bites.

    • KittenBiscuits@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      I think all kids should be cautioned to not believe a single thing their uncles tell them.

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    Can you put something for scale next to that pool thermometer? I don’t have this specific one.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        Depends on upkeep and species. Without a reference, one’s idea of this photo’s scale could be 2x off either way.

        • KittenBiscuits@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
          3·
          3 days ago

          I think it’s mostly crabgrass lol. I let the yard mostly do what it wants to, but I keep it trimmed to not encourage rodents. It could have some actual St. Augustine and Bermuda mixed in. It’s also got wild strawberries, clover, ground ivy, carpet weed and other neat colorful weeds that I actually kind of like. The yard is too damn big to do battle with weeds and maintain a monoculture of HOA darling Kentucky bluegrass, so when you can’t beat 'em, join 'em.

          • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            You’re assuming I know something about grass but in fact I don’t, which is where half of my error margins comes from.