That's just biology. Water concentrates prey. Prey draws predators. Snakes move along the safest, most sheltered lines of cover between hunting grounds. Which brings me to how I built my fence.
I used pressure-treated 6x6 posts sunk 3 feet into concrete footings spaced 8 ft apart with solid cedar privacy panels a full 6 feet tall tongue and groove no gaps and here's the detail that mattered most. I buried a galvanized hardware cloth skirt, 1/4-inch mesh 12 inches down and angled outward at the base. The same technique zoos use on reptile exhibit perimeters. Snakes are excellent at going under things. A fence that just sits on top of the ground is decorative, not functional.
That skirt cost me almost as much as the lumber, worth every dollar. The fence simply redirected snake movement away from the manicured yards next door and kept them within the natural corridor where they belonged. Heron Point estates went up fast after that. 41 lots, mostly quarter acre, packed close together the way subdivisions are these days. Zoysia lawns, in-ground sprinklers, a community pool with a cabana that cost, I later learned, $420,000 to build, a retention pond out back that everyone called the lake feature, even though it was really just runoff catchment with a fountain in it.
The brochures showed families barbecuing at sunset with the real lake glinting in the background past my fence line. Nobody who bought those lots ever asked why there was a solid cedar wall running along their back property lines. Most of them just assumed it was ugly and mildly annoying and none of their business. For 9 years, it worked exactly the way I built it to work. No snake bites in her point estates.
No emergency calls about copperheads in the mulch. No cottonmouth sunning themselves on somebody's pool deck. The system I'd spent 4 months building using three decades of field knowledge functioned perfectly and invisibly, which is the best kind of infrastructure there is. Then in the spring of last year, Denise Callaway moved into the corner lot backing directly onto my property and decided that invisible functioning safety infrastructure was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen. Denise Callaway had been HOA president of Heron Point Estates for exactly one year when she bought the lot directly behind mine, lot 14, the one with the best angle on the actual lake if you could see past a 6-ft cedar fence, which you couldn't.
I want to be fair to Denise because it's tempting to make her a cartoon, and she wasn't one. She was 51 years old, a former regional sales director for a flooring company. Sharp, organized, and genuinely good at the administrative side of running a homeowners association. She kept meticulous minutes. She chased down delinquent dues with real efficiency.
Under different circumstances, I might have respected her. But Denise had one governing obsession, and it colored every decision she made. Curb appeal. She talked about sightlines the way I talked about snake corridors. She believed with total sincerity that a subdivision's value lived or died on what a prospective buyer saw in the first 4 seconds of a driveway walk-through.