Wild!

Yuck. Maybe you saved someone from getting bit by getting rid of the babies!!
I wonder how many babies they can have?
Great pics. thanks.

Great pictures, and great job of getting rid of those snakes.

Wow!! and ewwwwwww.

Eleven babies in one snake is not encouraging to me. I am on the hunt for more females before they have babies. I don't care about them in the field just in my yard. I think predators must get most of the babies or I would be overrun with snakes. I'll bet chickens would even peck the little ones but I don't want to care for chickens or geese which would be even better.

Helen,

My reaction is the same as Lisa's. Ewwww! I am laughing and cannot believe you did that. I'd never get close enough to a snake to touch it, much less to disect it. If I have to pick up a dead snake to dispose of it, I use a hoe, rake or shovel to pick it up and carry it, holding it as far away from me as possible. I am not an unreasonable person, though. Since the wild things always are hungry, we always put it somewhere far away from the house and our animals so that a wild critter can find it and eat it. They usually get it within the first 24 hours.

Your snake must have been fairly old to have so many babies. They can have from only 1 to as many as 18 or 20, and I have always just assumed it would be the older, larger females that would be carrying a higher number. The one that Chris and I stumbled upon crossing the pasture with her young children wasn't really all that long or wide and only had 6 or 7 young snakes with her. I was too busy running away from them to get an accurate head count. I just remember looking down and seeing one big and multiple small snakes all around my feet.

What is even less encouraging for you is that pregnant females often have their young together in the same place.....I think of it as a maternity den....so if you have one pregnant female around, you likely have more than one. I think that copperheads are a lot more social than some other snakes because it is rare that I see only 1. If I see one copperhead on the edge of the woods while mowing, I'll likely see another 1 or 2 or 3 that same week, often in almost the same spot. We have a spot between our driveway and the neighbor's driveway (they are separated by about 120 or 130 yards) where the copperheads cross the road at virtually the same spot and have for years. We jokingly refer to it as Copperhead Crossing. They copperheads don't get in my garden as often as they get into yours. In my garden I usually get Timber Rattlers, rough green tree snakes and rat snakes. Last year and the year before I had western diamondback rattlers in the garden in July of each year.

Bon, Be careful mowing. That is when I most often see copperheads. Sometimes I haven't seen them until I've already run over them with the mower (and if they flatten themselves to the ground they can stay beneath the cutting blade and survive, so then you have a scared copperhead).

At least copperhead bites usually are not deadly. However, they are very painful and the recovery can be long and slow. When our next-door-neighbor was bitten on the ankle several years ago, she had to spend about a month in a wheelchair in order to keep the ankle elevated and her leg stayed swollen forever. Snakebites are very expensive, too, if they have to administer antivenin. It isn't unusual for the cost of the antivenin to drive the medical bills up into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Helen, You need a possum. Possums eat venomous snakes.

And, while I clearly hate venomous snakes and do all I can to avoid them, we all know that every creature fills a niche in the ecosystem. Those of us who live in rural areas would be overrun with rodents if we didn't have snakes here eating them. Also, there are some studies being done that involves using some snake venom (and scorpion venom too) to combat some types of cancer.

Our guineas, back when we had guineas, used to attack snakes pretty aggressively.

Dawn

I've done that before, but it was a black rat snake and it was full of eggs, since rat snakes lay eggs.

Helen, they might need you in Ontario. :)

Here is a link that might be useful: Snakes are cramped

I am not that interested in snakes just wanted to see why that snake was so darn thick. I want to find out about the creatures in my yard and copperheads especially. I know now from researching the web that gravid females don't eat and may congregate. I think I made a perfect habitat for them and I am correcting that. I burn wood and buy big oak blocks that are the ends of rr ties. I made a raised bed of them several years ago and now the blocks are rotting. I think they look like a nursery to mama copperhead.