Ive been gardening in our backyard for almost 30 years and I never....

I installed a new bird feeder in our backyard and for three days we didn't see any birds on it. I wasn't too worried as I had read a couple of articles that indicated it might take up to two weeks for them to 'discover' it. The strange thing with the feeder was that birds flew in close proximity to it, but didn't land on it. The day before the black widow/bee event, I ventured outside to check on the bird feeder. Right in front of me was a snake; not huge but maybe three feet in length. Maybe the snake was the reason the birds weren't landing on the feeders. I've been putting my hands in all of these flowering bushes to weed them, and in the almost 30 years of living in this house I've never seen a snake in our backyard. Our yard is surrounded by a 6ft cement block wall, except for a gate (which has chicken wire on it).  So I'm really not sure how a snake got into our yard. My best guess is that it climbed a tree or some bushes that are in our neighbors' yard in order to get over the wall. There is plenty to eat in our backyard, so I don't think the snake needs to go anywhere anytime soon. So in two days I went from sticking my hands in any bushes/shrubs in the backyard, to being extremely hesitant to ever do that again. Sure, this snake did not appear to be poisonous, but that doesn't mean we couldn't ever be visited by one! 



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