Sometimes I’m tempted to summarize my life in the woods with two simple sentences: I feed the birds. The birds feed the snakes.

In the book I write about one of my snake-in-the-bird’s-nest encounters: how I shone my flashlight into the dim corner of the garage to check on the broom-top wren’s nest and found myself eye to eye with a milksnake; how when I lifted it down with my walking stick I could plainly see its midsection distended with recently ingested wren’s eggs.

This past summer the milksnake was back. Dede and I were sitting on the porch, to the annoyance of the phoebes who had, once again, built their nest on the rafter under the roof, when I noticed a small snake on top of the porch rail. Another milksnake, I believe, but probably an adolescent, so I just picked it up and carried it out to the edge of the yard. The very next day, coming down the driveway, I looked up toward the phoebes’ nest and saw an impressive length of tail hanging from the rafter. Same snake already back again? No, this was that snake’s parent–or grandparent. Big, handsome fellow, like the one I had untangled from the wren’s nest the year before. I shoved him off the rafter, but the damage was done. Milked again.

Well, the phoebes do like that nice porch rafter, and they returned this spring. Sure enough, a couple of weeks ago I glanced out the window onto the front porch and saw that another adolescent-sized milksnake had made its way up onto the floor, looking ready to wind on up to rail level, and then . . . who knows? I grabbed him up and carried him a couple of hundred yards up the driveway–too far, I figured, for him to find the way back–and then let him go. (When biting me on the back of the hand didn’t do him any good, by the way, he became quite docile for the rest of the journey.) Based on last year’s experience, though, I didn’t figure to be done with snakes for the season.

I walked back down to the driveway and stopped at the faucet outside the garage to wash the snake musk off my hands. I was leaning over, rinsing away, proud of my little accomplishment, when–WHOA!–right there next to me, on the ground under the edge of the porch, was just a whopper of a copperhead. Now, how in the world was I going to get rid of that bad boy?

(To be continued . . .)