Dear heavens, you don't have to tell me about mice, voles, chipmunks, and squirrels. I've got a bumper crop of them too. As usual, kimmsr is right (a sweeping bow to kimmsr). The pile is quite dry. Although garter snakes do eat earthworms, they also like other things, and I suspect they are hunting baby voles and baby chipmunks. Slugs don't seem to be present in the compost, but the snakes will go to my gardens to hunt slugs and toads. I have a crazy neighbor lady who feeds the squirrels and chipmunks. Bless her heart (She goes out every night with a bucket of unshelled peanuts and puts them in the feeders for the rodents. Gee, I don't know why the rest of the neigborhood is having a chipmunk infestation. I find chipmunk holes all over the place, along with empty peanut shells. I had a general chat with her, just to see what she's thinking, and she informed me that she hates the hawks that hang around because the hawks are after her squirrels and chipmunks. She is not of this planet. I'm rooting for the hawks. :-) Sure enough, when leaving for work one morning last week, a beautiful red tail hawk was tearing apart a squirrel on my front lawn. Anyway, it looks like there is a 'munk nest (probably voles too) hanging out in the compost area. A garter snake buffet! Ah, voles. Don't you hate them? Honestly, aside from snakes and a cat, there's not much that works. Neither the snakes nor that cat are all that good at eliminating large numbers of rodents in a short period of time. I tried the granules -- you know, the sharp ones that are supposed to be uncomfortable for voles. It obviously didn't work, but then I learned that voles, especially the females, have very complex underground runs with many exits. They also seem to make new ones quickly. All I did was give them an obstacle that caused them to use alternatives. Did the predator urine thing too. Coyote urine. Despite the fact that we have 2 dogs that pee in the yard and it doesn't seem to deter the voles, we thought it clever to purchase expensive, smelly coyote urine. But again, given their ability to use alternate runs and their propensity for making new tunnels, it had little effect on the voles. Of course, neither voles nor chipmunks are as simplistic as we are, lol, and I found a study that essentially said that predator "byproducts" may keep the vermin at bay for a day or two. Eventually the drive to forage for food and/or find mates outweighs the risk of *possibly* encountering a predator. Success breeds success, and when the critters venture out to eat or mate and find no imminent threat, they start to ignore the urine. Sigh. I use mouse traps baited with grains, apples, or peanut butter and put them at the entrances to the vole runs. If you're worried about something coming into contact with the trap, cover it with a pail turned upside down over both the hole and the trap. When and if the vole is attracted by the food and exits the hole -- snap! It's ugly, but it's the only "sure kill" of any given vole. Keep doing it until you go several days without catching anything. Then try moving the traps someplace else where there are entrances to vole runs. My only concern is accidentally killing moles. Those star-nosed moles are especially cute. It's usually easy to tell the difference between a vole hole and a mole hole, as the mole hole will usually show loosened, slightly piled, soil around the outside of the hole. It looks obvious that something pushed up some dirt. Vole holes are usually "clean" with no sign of loosened soil at the entrance of the hole. I let the cat handle the chipmunks. It's not terribly efficient, but I don't want to deal with chipmunk carcasses. I used a havahart trap once to catch the chipmunk that was burrowing under the house's foundation. Ok, now that you've caught it what do you do with it? Drive it down the road a few miles and let it out at someone else's house? How to win friends. :-)

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.

Catherine, thanks! What about spraying individual sick plants or hitting individual weeds with roundup? That's my normal method. I use an organic gardening stuff for my lawn -- is that okay? Unfortunately we have a mowing service, and they ride around at top speed on those huge mowers. There are sections of the yard that aren't mowed, though. I could possibly add a water feature in one of those areas. Re: the water feature. Would one that isn't in the ground be of any help? One of those ponds-that-are-actually-a-tub-of-water-that-stands-on-the-deck kind of things? Or does it need to be something the toads can hop into and out of and such, something at ground level? What about garter snakes? Are the two mutually exclusive? Val

He or she won't hibernate under your crawl space - it won't be protected well enough under there. Likely it will crawl back to the woods, or hibernate in the chipmunk hole he visits. Females grow larger than males and have a tail that tapers more quickly - not an easy way to distinguish them, I know. See the link below for detailed species accounts and photos. joe Here is a link that might be useful: garter snake photos and info