An Aledo man admits he was startled when he walked out the front of his home and found a snake wrapped around the door handle.
"(It’s) quite a surprise when you walk out and a snake's head brushes up against your leg,” said David Smedley.
It was a harmless Texas rat snake, but his wife, Diane, said any kind of snake makes her squirm.
"I don't like them,” Diane Smedley said. “I don't know why they're on the Earth."
The Smedleys said they've found three snakes in just the last few days, including one in a potted plant.
Experts said there aren't any more snakes in North Texas than usual, but with all the recent rains, the snakes are just moving around more.
Diane Barber runs the snake collection at the Fort Worth Zoo.
"A lot of the snakes have been kind of displaced,” said Diane Barber, curator of ectothermy at the Fort Worth Zoo. “And so they're just going back to their homes. So they're roaming around in unfamiliar territory."
Barber said most snakes in Texas are not venomous, but if you don't know for sure, it's best to just leave them alone.
The Smedleys said they received seven inches of rain in just the past few days and figured the weather had something to do with the snakes moving around more.
"They've been washed out of the low areas and that and rocks and stuff and they’re just coming up,” David Smedley said. "Maybe it's just the year of the snakes. One year is the grasshoppers, the next year it's locusts. This year, it's snakes."
David Smedley said he safely captured the snake on his door, put it in a bucket and released it in some nearby woods.
