Grass Grows, Snakes Suffer Due to Rain

Never heard so many lawn mowers roaring at the same time this week. My neighbors and I have been frantically mowing our yards before the next rain. There is a possibility of a rainy weekend. UGH!

So, five hours on a lawnmower Wednesday and I got my knee-high jungle cut down to ankle height anyway. Still, there is that area of my lawn I call the swamp that has been under water ever since the beginning of May, and still shows no sign of drying out completely. That swamp grass will just have to stay knee high for a bit longer.

We’ve about got this 20-plus inches of rain situation under control, except for one little problem that scares me a lot. That would be the herptiles. Herptiles? Yes. The critters who crawl out of the weeds on rainy days and scare me. That would be snakes. Tortoises also crawl out of the weeds on rainy days, but be warned, I stop to save them. That is move them out of the way of oncoming traffic, and my lawnmower.

I do not stop to save snakes. Well, I won’t try to run over one of them either. There is a limit to my response to fear. Hey, if a poisonous snake is trying to get in my house, and if a have a choice, that snake will die. But if it’s a non-poisonous snake minding its own business out in my yard, we leave it be.

So I was a bit distressed to find two of the little fellers, those who promise not to poison me, dead in my lane recently. Darling Daughter found another as she whacked weeds last weekend. What’s happening? Has it rained so much that our good snakes (a good snake is one that eats bad snakes) are trying to crawl to higher ground, and run into obstacles? Like floods? Protective dogs? Can snakes drown? I worried I might have run over that little green snake, that does nothing harmful, just eats those bugs that are bugging me. Darling Daughter was downright indignant when she found that rat snake all curled up and dead. 

“They are the ones who eat the poisonous ones, and the rats,” she declared. And, a recent trip along roads bordering the Arkansas River revealed numerous snakes dead on the road.

So what’s up? A quick check of the Internet news found stories that report yes, our recent flooding is causing the snakes to seek higher ground, some in our homes with us (EEK!), and some on roads where they get smashed, and yes they can drown if trapped underwater and unable to breathe. But that doesn’t explain the demise of the snakes in my lane and yard. Maybe they just got too waterlogged, like me.

And I will confess that I have stopped to remove two tortoises from roads, where they crawled to get away from the damp, and one from in front of my pickup truck. But that’s normal in Oklahoma. It does appear our rainy weather is as disastrous for our herptiles as it is for us. So when it came time to mow, I worried. But it was OK. No tortoises, no snakes, I don’t think. Of course lawnmowers can make mincemeat of about anything and I might not have noticed, and thus I apologize to anything I might have minced.