The pictures I've seen of the fragrans Massangeana don't match up. The trunk of this tree is maybe three inches and the leaves are about 36 inches coming up from the trunk, like a snake plant grows straight up.

That looks like an amazing trip was had! All the photos are wonderful and the cats are grand in their natural environment. My favorite though, is "Sisters." :) Thank you very much for sharing! MichaelAT

we love them. haven't found any coppers, and would be cautious if we did, but most other snakes get handled if i have gloves on. i've rescued 2 snakes out of our pond netting- one this spring, who reall yhad itself tangled good. it was so calm and let me ease it and cut it loose. 'course, i don't know how smart it was, b/c it got itself tangled back up pretty quick, while i was still easing out the backside. i escorted him to the backyard, since he was a hognosed snake, and had been after our frogs. i will run off big water snakes, b/c i don't want them after our fish, but i don't kill them. we back up to lake easement(read swamp), so we get a good many various snakes over a yr's time. trying to convince our neighbors to call me next time he finds a big one instead of chopping its head off. we celebrate when we find worm snakes- means our soil's doing great! we even kept 2 rough green snakes in our terrarium with the anoles & skinks for a summer. they were the biggest pigs! they were like moving sculptures, though- very entertaining. the thing i found most fascinating, is being solitary creatures, you wouldn't think they'd enjoy each other's company, but the opposte was true. they stayed close to each other and slept all balled into a green mass. they'd fattened up so we let them go in fall knowing they were in good shape for winter. they stayed in the tree i put them in for more than a day- no doubt hoping i'd offer some tasty crickets. the llizards were nervous of them when we first introduced them, but within a couple days they ignored them. we realeased everything last year- got to be too much trouble. it was fun and taught us a lot, though. tam

As suggested by another poster, I think the lack of sightings is more due to the shy nature of the coral snake then the scarcity of them. I have seen three of them on my property since I moved here in 1988. All of the snakes were under something I was moving. The most recent encounter was in April of this year when I was leveling an area in a shrub bed that I was preparing to pour some concrete to serve as a slab base foundation for the battery bank for my solar power system. I was hitting some of the old plastic weed barrier which was covered with river rock. My rake hooked the plastic and peeled up a bit of it and a small coral popped out of there. He really was small an beautiful. In my moment of ponder about what to do with this deadly little creature, it was all the time the little fellow needed to slither into a very thick arborvitae. I just hope my dogs never run into it. The chocolate lab in particular is a perpetual puppy even though she's three and a half!