I've never seen a black snake here, though I know they can get REALLY big. I have seen a sizeable water snake a couple of times, and the kind we have here, though not poisonous in the least bit, are VERY aggressive and will bite the heck out of you if you tick them off. The milk snake I have, the last time I actually picked it up to measure it, was 43". It's pretty big for a milk snake, but nowhere near as big as those black snakes get. The first time I ever saw the milk snake was when I opened the outside basement door and it was sitting there, right under it, enjoying the heat from the sun warming the doors. It scared the heck out of me as I had never seen one before and they are quite striking looking. Once I looked it up to see what it was the fear went away, but for a split second I thought it was a copperhead.
I'm actually pretty lucky here as we don't have anything at all in this area that is poisonous, nor any animals that we really have to worry about. With that said, there have occasionally been black bears spotted around here, but I haven't heard of any sightings for over ten years now, though I'm sure they're still out there.
But....
When I was a kid I missed the very first day of fifth grade due to a bicycle accident I had the day before (still have a good sized scar from it to this day). Though I was supposed to be taking it easy I went outside due to boredom and went the front picture window. My mother was inside reading so I tapped the window and waved to her, then happened to look down. We had these juniper type bushes on either side of the window, and stretched between them was a snake. I couldn't see its head, nor its tail, as both were behind each bush, but it was big enough that I froze, then backed up. I told my mom, who told me to go and get the neighbor, who happened to be some type of naturalist. He came over, looked at it, went back to his house and came back with a shovel. Needless to say, after it was dead we found out that it was a water moccasin. How a water moccasin got to Western NY is beyond me, and the only thing we could figure is that it hitched a ride on some type of produce truck and fell off of it near our place.
A neighbor up the street kept exotic pets and we thought that, perhaps, it came from his place, too. We never did figure it out.
Had it not been stretched between the two bushes it surely would have struck me as I was within about a foot of it.
