Yes Brown Widows. I am glad you reminded me...I was going to bed but now I must hunt Widows. I have knocked them down radically by going out at night and "torching" them. (Small torch called a BenzOMatic for soldering) My local entimologists really had no advice for me. Getting rid of spiders is very difficult. (I will not kill everything to kill them.) So I am making it up as I go. (They want me to let them know how it goes! LOL, Geeez!) From hundreds to 10s is pretty good! I also use sticks (cause they are slow) when they are in my plants, so I don't burn them up. :-( They are NOT aggressive. Each egg sac can have upto 35 babies, ewww. So you definitely want to get rid of them. Not fun but you must go out at night because they are highly visible. Kill them. In the morning remove the webs with broom or whatever so the next night you can see the new webs. Continue for a few nights and soon there will be very few. The entimologist says to put the egg sacs in alcohol to kill them. I "torch" them. The webs and sacs are so sticky it is not easy to put them into a jar of alcohol! Like trying to get a piece of tape stuck on you to fall into the trash can. Not fun when you already have the heebie jeebies. They are everywhere here in SOCal. By the hundreds. zyperiris, I wish for your Father a smooth as possible journey. (I went through lung cancer with my Mom) Oh yeah, as far as your Dads animals the vets have said they are not getting any more spider bites than normal since the Brown Widow introduction/infestation. Thank goodness! (Same with hospital reports and humans, by the way.) I have read everything I can get my heebie jeebied hands on. Take good care of you and your sister. Allison ps I love my spiders and beetles and ants and all, but this has been crrazzy!

We lived in the SF Bay Area when I was growing up. (Gorgeous Garter Snakes there! A colorful kind too which are only in SF, they're endangered! We used to see them all the time when I was little, they're so pretty!) Anyway, my mom was tending her artichokes, and later that night, A HUGE black scorpion fell out of her hair!!!! We freaked, she was hysterical, my dad smooshed it, and it didn't sting anyone thank goodness! In the Santa Cruz Mountains where we had a cabin there were these awful, huge, gross, yellow spotted banana slugs that would hang out in the garden, I think they stung too. They are UC Santa Cruz's Mascot. Stepping on a snail barefoot. There are tons of them in the Bay Area, along with Black Widows. The Black Widows get huge too! They are so scary looking, all shiny & black with the red violin on their back! We did have Praying Mantis' though, they were so cool looking, and were great to keep on the Rose Bushes to eat all the aphids. I moved to Washington two years ago, and I have never had such a Garden Enemy as the slugs we have here. They are horrible! It is amazing how much defoliation can occur in one night from these things! They are all different colors, black, brown, spotted, they are hairy, and some look like they have armour on. I hate them! During the growing season I do, "Slug Patrol," every night. I fill a large baggie almost every night with them. It's fun to pour salt in the baggie and watch them melt. They are disgusting!!!!!! I hate them! Here is a link that might be useful: San Francisco Garter Snake

I don't know who should get credit for this, but it appeared in my mailbox a couple of days ago. After this thread, I decided to go dig it out of my trash file. GRASS SNAKES CAN BE DANGEROUS... Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why. A couple in Sweetwater,Texas had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze. It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants. When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa. She let out a very loud scream. The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the sofa. He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it. About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor. His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance. The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out. About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital. The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor who volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch.. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief. But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa. The neighbor, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her. The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches. The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that the snake had bitten him. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat. By now, the police had arrived. Breathe here... They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over a little garden snake! The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife. Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and, as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes. The other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car. Meanwhile, neighbors saw the burning drapes and called in the fire department. The firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the power, and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire out). Time passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all was right with their world. A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring in their plants for the night. And that's when he shot her.

I will say that I agree with those who say proper identification is necessary and good. If you live in an area with snakes, it is important to know what the actual dangerous ones look like. As I said before, I know rattlers are in the area and every year there seems to be a few news articles about people getting bit. We also have bull snakes which mimic rattlers, even making the familiar rattle sound. I had a scary moment a few years ago. We were plagued with wildfires due to a severe drought and we had to evacuate our home. We were let back in around 11 that night and we got the kids in bed. A few hours later, I woke up to contractions. I didn't want to bother the rest of the family yet as it was still early labor so I just started making preparations. Packing bags for my kids to stay at grandma's, loading the car with my hospital bag, etc. I was going in and out of the house, leaving the garage door open to carry stuff out when I heard a loud rattle right next to my feet. I like to joke that the snake sped up my labor. It was RIGHT next to the door into my house, curled up under a work bench. Since I was full term, I didn't want to risk getting close enough to id if it was a rattler or a bull snake but now this snake was between me and the only transportation to the hospital I had! I woke up my hubby (not good with snake id) and called my dad (great with snake id) and hubby helped me get the kids ready while my dad came over to investigate. Turns out it was just a bull snake who probably came in the garage when we were evacuating to escape the fires himself. I guess I woke him up and he didn't like it so he was trying to tell me to back off. But he stayed in the same spot for 45 minutes until Dad put him in a bucket and took him across the street and released him. My baby was born a few hours later. I'm glad the snake didn't die. I'm also glad he didn't come in the house when I left the door open!!