Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> Need to get cats to 
> keep down the mice.
> 

Cats will keep down the snakes too.    Some say the goddess Bast got her 
origin because in the swampy delta region the people were plagued with snakes 
until they started keeping domestic cats .... so Bast is seen as doing battle 
with 
Apep, the snake king.

We've had cats swell up like a toad frog from copperhead bites and recover.  
Most of the time the cat just shows up with a dead snake sometimes several 
times longer than the cat.  (the specie of copperhead native to the mountains 
here is much smaller than the more southern copperhead).

Alas the cat's aren't discriminating when it comes to snake hunting, a lot of 
small indigo, garter, grass - snakes get eaten.  They don't bother the 
several very large species of blacksnakes we have, and those are another 
thing that 
keeps down the vipers.  In the years that we see a lot of black racers and 
other blacksnakes, we see very few copperheads.  In years there are few 
blacksnakes, the copperheads are as numerous as earthworms.

Very large timber rattlers are native here, but i've never seen one.  There's 
a picture of a record large timber rattler that was killed in my front 
pasture when it was a holding yard for logs many years ago, but I've never 
seen one 
here.

Everyone here points to the harmless grey watersnake and yells "Cottonmouth!" 
but there are no cottonmouths here.

I had my least problem with the troublesome mice and voles the year I saw 
more than 30 copperheads in the garden (not all at once, thank Bast!).  Don't 
know that I reckon it a good trade.