Found this little eastern worm snake adrift at "sea" on my pool thermometer and airlifted it to shore. It must have entered ~~fight, flight, or~~ freeze mode, poor thing, because it was a good 10 minutes before it departed its makeshift raft.
PS, I do have escape platforms for critters in the pool but the dumdums never seem to use them. Then again, I'm obviously not getting to meet the ones that did find and use them.
PPS, I can't get over how teeny this little one is! I'm experiencing some acute cute aggression!
This reminds me of a nightmare / trauma I had as a kid:
We lived on a farm and so we had these old rugs that worms would live under whenever we wanted to go fishing we would pull up a rug and there would be 10-15 worms under a single rug a nifty trick but we also had plenty of snakes that we would run into from time to time, they would get in the chicken coop and eat the eggs and chickens or live in birds nests or just swim along the creek we fished in but anyway the irrational fear was I would pick up a rug grab a hand full of worms put them in my pocket for fishing (it's irrational because who stores works in there pocket??) and not notice my uncle told us that you don't actually feel the snakes bite you (probably a lie idk) so I would assume I would just be walking along and slowly die from snake bites.
I think all kids should be cautioned to not believe a single thing their uncles tell them.