Sunday, December 28, 2008

Surprises, lovely and otherwise

For those who remember a few months back when I mentioned I'd been given a bunch of rose cuttings which I was attempting to grow new roses from for the first time ever, check this out! I not only kept many of them alive to this point but one of them decided to give us a Boxing Day gift... the first flower!

I'm prejudiced but I think it's just lovely!

This is one of my older roses, planted by the previous owners and rather neglected it's now giving lovely big flowers the size of your hand.

Our not so pleasant surprise is that while we were near the house today chatting about letting the bigger ducklings out, Nic spotted a nice big copperhead between us. Going by the fence it was sitting near it'd measure a bit over 80cm or so. I was raised to believe we live with our wildlife and give it a healthy respect but all the same I'm not at all thrilled to see it right where Laurent and the dogs run around. The dogs had been running around that spot only about 20 mins previous and La was on his swingset at the time.

4 comments:

No one said...

Eeeek! Chance are though that the snake would take off if there was a lot of thumping around on the ground around it, don't you think? Don't take my word for it, mind you, I know nothing about snakes... I'm afraid coming across a snake in my yard would be enough to make me consider moving, roflmao!

Amanda O. said...

Yeah, they're not any more keen on a confrontation than we are, they'll only do so if they think they have no other choice but to defend their life and even then many times you get warnings to try and scare you off. The main risk is if the human is young enough not to reliably understand or critter is too curious to just let them be. We have talked to La about not touching snakes unless an adult says it's okay (he LOVES to go to the petstores and hold pythons etc, so he's not at all afraid of them) but at 3 he's too young to really be relied upon to remember when it counts when out of sight.

Luckily, the copperheads, while they are venomous, are much more reluctant to bite and more prone to feign/not inject venom compared to more high strung/aggressive species.

Lucy C said...

Scary all the same.
I have a fb friend who photographed a 2m Tiger snake on her back verandah today.
Eeek!

Lucy C said...
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