My 8 year old found a baby snake in the yard today.  It crawled over his foot, causing him to run inside screaming and shaking with fear.

I went out to see what it was, and spotted it under the outside toy box.  Small, about 8" long, with a grey/tan pattern and a flat diamond shaped head.  It struck at me, so I went and got a stainless steel bowl and my garden hoe (I looked for gloves and couldn't find any) and trapped it. 

We're lucky; we have an entomology department on call 24x7, so I called them. "No, it's not a rattler, it's a gopher/bull snake", the dude said.  I said it wasn't; I'd had one of those for a pet last year and it didn't look anything like that.  "Then it's a gardener snake", he said.  "Nope again", I said, "I lived in Florida and North Carolina for long enough to know what those look like and it aint one of them". "I'm tellin ya", he said, "we don't get venemous snakes around here".  "That's fine for you to say that", I said, "but I'm telling you that I can't identify this snake and you don't want to come and see it, so I'll take care of it." 

So, big brave Dharma calls her husband at work and has him swing by in his patrol vehicle to rescue her from the snake. Dave made the comment that it looked more like a worm than a snake, but it laid into his gloves when he picked it up.  We could hear it's little fangs catching on the leather as it struck and struck again.  He couldn't identify it either, but he did agree with me that it didn't resemble either a gopher or a gardener.  He ended up tossing it over the fence and into the long grass down by the stream at the end of our yard....I said "yeah, now it can come back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again."

I'm keeping my garden hoe out just in case.  Why, I don't know, because I coudn't bring myself to kill it today and I doubt I'll be able to do it tomorrow.  But I'm still keeping it out.