I lived in Central VA for over 20 years. We had so many copperheads, it was normal to see them in the spring and summer. I have scooped one out of my swimming pool with a net. You aways looked for the M. I had two black racers that lived in my garage and the kids w ere under strict orders to leave the. Be. You seldom saw them but they were almost always there. In the springtime, during gardening/ cleanups I have killed over a dozen in a day. Most were 18 inches or less. A few were 24 inches. On the day that I sold that house to a coworker, I was loading up some stuff out some stuff from the shop/garage and he cried out. There was a a beast of a copperhead in the pool area on the smooth cement and it was going straight at him. It was aggressively pursuing him. I killed it with a shovel.
For the most part, copperheads are ambush hunters. They don’t run away like a lot of other snakes. They just wait till you are close enough and then they bite you.
Now that I have moved to the blue ridge mountains, I still have copperheads, and further up the mountain we have timber rattlers. I haven’t seen a rattler yet. If I do, I’ll dump the clip.
