No conflict, just snakes doing what snakes have done since before South Carolina was a state. Then the timber company sold and a developer broke ground on Heron Point Estates. 41 lots, most backing right up to my property line. All marketed with the words serene lake views plastered across every brochure. The snakes weren't going anywhere.
Their home range didn't disappear because a construction crew put up vinyl siding. They were simply going to keep moving the way they always had, except now instead of empty timberland, there'd be swimming pools, flower beds, and toddlers in bare feet. So, I made a decision. Before the first house in Heron Point Estates even got a certificate of occupancy, I started building a fence along my entire boundary line, 640 feet of it, running the full length where my property met the subdivision. Carol thought I was being paranoid.
I told her I'd spent three decades studying exactly this kind of collision between development and habitat and I wasn't going to gamble our neighbors safety or my own conscience on hope. She trusted my judgment. She always had. That fence took me 4 months of weekends to finish. And by the time I drove the last post, I felt something I don't feel often.
Real peace of mind. I had no way of knowing that a decade later, a woman named Denise Callaway would tear that fence down over a view, and that the lake she was so desperate to see would send something back through the gap that no amount of landscaping could hide. Lake Marion is the largest lake in South Carolina, 110,000 acres of reservoir carved out of the Santee River Basin back in the 1940s. Where I live near the town of Santee, the shoreline isn't the manicured kind you see on postcards. It's Cypress Tupelo swamp thick with Spanish moss, dark water, and root systems that have been quietly rearranging the mud for 80 years.
That swamp is prime real estate if you're a pit viper. I want to walk you through exactly what lives on that shoreline because it matters for everything that comes later. Cotton mouths, water moccasins, most folks call them own the marsh edge. They're heavy-bodied, dark, sometimes almost black, and they hold their ground instead of fleeing, which is exactly why so many people get bitten by them. An adult cottonmouth can go 5 feet long.
They den up in root masses and stump holes during winter and hunt fish, frogs, and baby birds along the shallows all summer. Copperheads prefer it drier. The leaf litter at the marsh to forest transition, exactly the strip my fence ran through. They're ambush predators patterned in hourglass bands of copper and tan that make them nearly invisible in dead leaves. Copperheads are responsible for more venomous bites in the southeastern United States than any other species, mostly because people simply don't see them until they've stepped too close.
Then you've got the nonvenomous residents, eastern rat snakes, which can top six feet and climb like they've got suction cups, and eastern king snakes, black and white banded, famous for one very useful habit. They eat other snakes, copperheads included. A healthy kingsnake population actually suppresses venomous snake numbers. Anybody who understood the ecosystem would want king snakes around, not fewer of them. All four species used my property as a travel corridor between the lake and the deep timber to the north.