Glad I don't live in florida

Two articles caught my eye today, both concerning Florida. One is the plight of an island where the Bush family has a vacation home (oh wah for them) which is overrun by iguanas. 12,000 of them. I happen to think iguanas are pretty cool. If you look through my vacation pictures, every time I see an iguana, I take a picture of it. At Tulum they were everywhere, sunning themselves on the buildings. You know I try to catch them too. But the residents of this island are catching and torturing the iguanas. How the hell does torturing a dump reptile teach it anything? The picture is cropped from that article.
I like iguanas. One of the Deep Ones novels I wrote had an iguana named Izzy Pop as a central character. When I stayed in Florida 3 years ago for my shaman training, I thought the little lizards in the bungalow we were in were awesome. (And then one day we came in to find a random cat asleep in our bed--that was strange.)

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and then there's the snakes. "Snakes the size of telephone poles."
I don't hate or fear snakes. I don't have fondness for them like I do iguanas either.
Florida's newest problem is a creepy one, and it is roughly the circumference of a telephone pole. It has no toes. It snacks on rabbits.And it's growing in number and in feet: the Burmese python.
These are pets who got too big and were let loose on purpose, or pets which escaped. And of course they love it in Florida, and they breed. They are competing with alligators as the top (non human) predator.
My mom claims she saw on the news that a woman found a COBRA in her yard in Florida but I can't find any sources for that. I'm not scared exactly of venomous snakes, but I am wary (as any intelligent person should be). I've had close encounters a couple of times with copperheads. Once I was at Hubbard Park in Meriden with my parents and my aunt Bert. My mom and I walked to the edge of the lake (the one up the hill a little)--it was low so we had to climb down some stairs and walk across a "beach". When we went to return to the car, we saw a 4' copperhead at the bottom of the stairs. We had stepped right over it without seeing it. Now we had to step over it again--and my mom is terrified of snakes. But we did it, and the snake didn't bite us, move or even care.
Another time I was at Sleeping Giant with some friends. We saw a baby black snake sunning itself on a rock (we actually saw 3 that day so they must have just hatched or something). It was really cute and we went over to look at it closer. And just behind the rock, in the leaves, was a huge copperhead just hanging out. Whether it was eyeing the baby to eat, I don't know. But that thing was very well camoflagued by its rusty color in those dead leaves. If we had just been walking along and not stopped to look at the black snake, we never would have seen it. And it was maybe a foot from the path. So no doubt if you walked slowly and looked carefully you'd see many of them. I was up there another time on a smaller trail and met someone who said there was a big copperhead across the path, but I didn't encounter it . My husband (he wasn't my husband yet or even my boyfriend, just a friend back then) said he saw it too (we all used to hang out on Sleeping Giant back then).
Another time I was at Guifrida Park (I spelled that wrong) which used to belong to my dad's family but is now a park. I found a 6' damp copperhead skin. I had it in the big unabridged dictionary to dry but it fell all to pieces.