I've run the woods since I was a wee toddler and seen and killed my share of snakes. Once while digging bottles in an old dump site my partner and I were finding copperheads in a lot of our holes, we would pull em out as far as safe then whack em with our diggers. Found a lot of nice old bottles there but had no desire to go back. Black snakes bed down for winter right alongside rattlers and copperheads in the same dens, not so sure that the sayings that they eat venomous snakes is true or not. Got a triple bite on my left forearm by a copperhead April of 2015, still gives me problems over a year later, the one that bit me got away. I killed a 6 foot copperhead myself back in the late 60's on the Oconee River in Georgia, several eyewitnesses to the event, and have seen others over 3 feet long, so know they get bigger. Spent a day with a professional herpetologist in the woods one fine day in the mid 70's, and he learned quit a bit about snakes that somehow defied all his prior knowledge. I kill them all now, don't like em around my house. Slingshot is my preferred tool for snake elimination.
