Ok, I have to ask, what were your parents doing with a bunch of venomous snakes in the house?
My father owned a surveying company, among other things. He was on a job where a grader had driven across a snakes nest, killing mama, but leaving a bunch of live babies. A few of the guys put the babies into their empty coffee cups and brought them home, my father ended up with two of them. This was the late 1970’s, way pre-internet, and even before my parents had Encyclopedia Britannica in the house, so my dad had no clue of ID on these cute little baby snakes.
They went into an aquarium we had from prior hermit crabs or gerbils, with a screened lid and a brick set atop that for safety. I suspect my father’s plan was to get a book on snakes at the library the next day, so he could figure out what they were.
In any case, at some point in the interim, 3-year old me thought it was a good idea to take the lid off the aquarium, and they got loose in the house. My mother gathered up us kids and we all went to stay at our grandparents’ house, while dad was left home to find the snakes.
He found one and set it free in the large open space behind our house, maybe 200 acres separating our development from the small highway running past our borough. It took him some time to find the second one, in which he finally figured out they were actually copperheads, before finally finding the second one dead inside a baseboard radiator.
Several years later, we were living in another part of town when they started developing that big open space behind our old house. There was an article in the newspaper about a large mature copperhead they had found in that field, and I can’t help but think it was ours.
www.virginiaherpetologicalsociety.com
