Ever had a garter snake take up residence in your yard?
ilovemytrees
11 years ago
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Garter Snakes-- need advice
Comments (12)Garter snake=harmless. Cotton mouth= Yikes! Too scary, countrycarolyn. I had an uncle from Ohio that was came to visit us in Alabama to hunt. We took him up to Mt. Cheaha where we saw some guy trying to capture a HUGE (my young mind remembers it being about 5' long, but I don't was know what it was in reality) rattlesnake alive so he could take it to some lady who milked the venom and did research. I guess she was not normal, having a hobby like that. My uncle hates snakes and decided right then and there that Alabama was a No Hunting Zone. I was amazed when I moved to NH that there are NO native poisonous snakes. NONE! Hard to believe. My 11yo daughter can catch snakes with her hands. I guess she's not normal, either. This week in the garden we saw a big garter snake with a huge bulge in its body. Don't know what it had for dinner, but it looked like it was about the size of a mole or vole. What a helpful snake! P.S. Once in Alabama there was a small rattle snake underneath my bed. I have no idea how it got there, but it was quite a surprise to see it staring at me when I went to get a box out. Remembering my parents' adrenaline-pumped strategy to kill the thing is still a hysterical memory. I'm not too scared of snakes, and they would have been better off letting me try to catch it, but then I would have missed out on one of the most hysterically funny episodes of my childhood. The best paid comedy writer couldn't have made it any funnier....See MoreToo many snakes in my yard...
Comments (17)Not many people enjoy snakes more than I do, but I have to say, even I would not be happy to have one fall on me out of nowhere before I knew what it was. My story along those lines involves a cat house we built on the back of our home years ago, with a kitty door going out to it. A little verandah for our indoor cats, so they could lay on the cat shelves out there and enjoy the fresh air. Unfortunately, it wasn't screened in, but rather, enclosed with a wide mesh wire fencing. This meant that lizards and snakes and many other creepy crawlies could take short cuts right through it. (Though why anything would WANT to cut through a small enclosed area with three large cats hanging out in it is beyond me.) Suffice it to say, many snakes were cat nabbed and carried proudly back through the cat doors over the years. My husband at the time had a phobia about them, and would end up standing on the chairs or the sofa hollering at me to come get the snake (which was almost NEVER injured in any visible way) and take it outside. It was a funny sight. But he got the last laugh. I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night once and stepped right on top of a black racer in my bedroom...in my bare feet...in the dark! There was MUCH screaming and hollering and hopping about coming from ME that time! This one was injured, but definitely still thrashing about. *shiver* THAT will wake you up right quick! Marcia...See MoreGarter Snakes
Comments (12)Nothing will repel a hungry snake no matter what kind of marketing stuff gets posted to our forum. Sandplum, Our son stepped out of his car one evening in summer, after dark but in the lighted area near the security light, and found his foot on top of a copperhead which did not, miraculously, bite him. He hollered "Copperhead!" at us and stepped back into the car, since only that one leg was all the way out of the vehicle. We were sitting in lawn chairs chatting with some friends. That snake, had it chosen to turn and go back into the neighbor's pasture from whence it came, could have and would have lived. Instead, it chose to head straight for the lawn furniture we were sitting upon. Maybe it wanted to seek refuge under the furniture. Big mistake. Tim shot it. I felt kinda bad about that since the snake hadn't even bitten Chris when it certainly had the opportunity, but there's no way we're going to sit there chatting in the yard while a venomous snake prowls around our feet. I hate snakes as much as you do. Dorothy, I wonder where the garter snakes went? We've never had a year that was free of garter snakes and I've already had one in the garden this year. Tim picked it up and carried it far from the garden and released it. I don't mind the garter snakes or rough green tree snakes, but venomous snakes automatically get killed if they venture into our people/animal space and I'm not going to apologize for that. We used to even catch and release rat snakes and chicken snakes, but they just keep coming back to the poultry coops over and over again, feasting on eggs and chicks, so they get the death penalty too if they are in or near the chicken coops. The only good venomous snake is a dead one. We live in too much of a wilderness area to ever be snake-free, and they serve the important function of controlling rodents, but I'm still not going to share yard and garden space with the venomous ones. Our little puppy dog, Princess, who is about six months old now, got bitten by something, probably a snake, in the dog yard last week. It likely hit her inside her mouth so I imagine she bent down low to the ground and tried to pick it up. Her mouth and snout started swelling up something awful immediately and she was in pain and whimpering, so off to the vet we went for a steroid shot. Since even the vet couldn't find fang marks, we'll never know for sure if it it was a snake or some sort of insect, but knowing our snake history, I suspect it was a snake. Our cat, Casper, had seen a snake a short distance from the dog yard several weeks ago (long before I would have thought snakes were active) and he tried to get it, then jumped back away from it, so I suspect it struck at him but missed him. With Princess, the swelling began going down as soon as she got the shot (and some Benadryl) and we continued to give her Benadryl for 48 hours thereafter to keep the swelling down. She's fine now and I hope she learned her lesson about messing with snakes. I would expect the snakes are really getting out and moving more now that we are having sunshine and warmer temperatures, but I haven't seen a lot of them yet. Keep in mind that to my way of thinking, even one snake is one too many. I've run over copperheads with the lawn mower that I never even saw before I hit them. I'm just glad I hit them with the mower instead of stepping on them. I know people who have been bitten by venomous snakes, including our next-door neighbor, and it was a horrible ordeal for them. The recovery is not easy and complications can last for months afterwards. We had tons of copperheads in our early years, but in more recent years we see them a lot less. Unfortunately, the situation is reversed with the timber rattlers. We didn't see too many of them in our earliest years here, but for about the last 10 years, we see higher numbers of timber rattlers every year. Last year was the worst ever and it is a miracle I wasn't bitten by one because I had way too many close calls where I came within inches to 2' to 3' of timber rattlers before seeing them. For a while I was seeing them almost daily. The one that was within a few inches of my foot was very small. Had it been larger, I might have been in trouble....See Morewhat to do with large garter snake?
Comments (4)Well, you aren't going to end up with a large den of them because densites are not chosen by where it is easy to live in the summer but rather where they can survive the winter. If you were going to have denning gartersnakes on your property, they would already have been there for decades. As for protecting them from your dogs, you could train your dogs to leave them alone. Unfortunately, trying to teach a terrier not to chase animals is like trying to teach one to read Russian. I like terriers, but this is their one fatal flaw for me. Maybe you could treat the area where the snake hangs out with a chemical that is aversive to dogs but not snakes? If you could find a dead snake and cover it in habanero chili sauce and let your dog play with it, that would teach the lesson pretty well and not hurt the dog. The other solution is to provide the snakes safe passage and hiding areas that are difficult for the dog to access. I actually knew a person who installed a plastic pipe under their dog kennel to give snakes and toads a safe path to their pond....See Morewisconsitom
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