Snakes in my (insert the well-known potty mouth words here) back yard!

OK, so my two children are fishing on the pond behind our house over the weekend, and my son comes running in and says, "Dad, come outside. You need to see this!" So I go out there, and there's a little water snake in the water, burrowing under the leaves at the edge. If my son had said, "We got snakes! Snakes in our motherfucking back yard!, well, there would've been trouble, because he's 12. Anyway, we watch the snake for a couple of minutes and he swims away. My children tell Mrs. Novelist about this, and her response was to ask me, "Did you kill it?" Me: "No. He wasn't hurting anything." Her: "The only good snake is a dead snake."

This is a medical situation; if a snake crawls up on my patio, which will happen, since we live within 60 feet of a body of water, my wife will have a heart attack. It'll never have to touch her or bite her or anything. She'll just freak. And I say this in the most loving, compassionate way possible.

So my question: Anyone here ever use any of those snake repellent treatments on their yard, and if so, was it effective?

 

Can't help you on the question of snake repellent, but I'll second your wife's motion that the only good snake is a dead snake. MFs give me the heebie-jeebies. Spiders, too.

 

As long as it was a water snake and not a water moccasin or cottonmouth, don't worry about it. If it is a venomous snake, then about your only option is...

 

I've been living your particular little nightmare, n_w. Our back yard is almost completely an in-ground swimming pool with concrete deck around it. And twice this spring, my wife has come in the back door speaking in tongues and totally white. There's been a water snake back there.

Well, first thing we did was ask our exterminator about snake repellent. He recommended some, Snake-A-Way, but added these points. It's pretty expensive to cover any expanse of area. $15.50 for a four-pound bag which will cover 200 linear feet. And as soon as it rains, it's gone. You have to put it down again. I think it's working fairly well, though; we haven't seen the snake.

If you're really concerned about it (or your wife is), do what we did ... call the local game commission. They'll send someone out (at cost; like $80 or so) and look around. If the snake's there, he'll get it out. Our guy came out and although he didn't find the snake, he pinpointed where the problem was ... the snake was wiggling in between stones in our wall around the pool, then coming out to sun himself. We pumped in Snake-A-Way in the holes between stones.

Here's the Snake-A-Way Web site.

 

Dear Mrs. n_w and Barsuk,

Y'all are idiots and wimps as well. I freely admit to have a black snake as a resident of my backyard and I'm glad --- it cuts down on the kinds of things that nibble at my tomatoes and green peppers. There are also no rat droppings in miscellaneous places, which I also attribute to my good neighbor with scales. He's not poisonous and he keeps vermin out --- good deal, as far as I'm concerned.

 

As a kid, one of our past times was catching snakes. We'd go in the woods and lift over rocks and stuff. Go swimming in streams and catch them near the weeds.

Had a cool gopher snake who would pretend to be a cobra and play dead when that didn't work. Cute little guy.

Heard of a former editor, though, who was deathly afraid of snakes. Changed the tires on his car when he ran over one. Had his swimming pool drained and scrubbed when he saw one in the pool.

 

Point of herpetological correctness order: Snakes are not poisonous (toxins are not disseminated on contact as in some frogs and poison ivey). Some are venomous (congrats, Inky!), meaning the toxins have to be cast into the victim, most frequently by injection.

moving on: 2mcm, my wife is not an idiot. Irrational on the point of snakes, yeah, I'll go for that. Your other points, about environmental benefits, are well taken.

Shotglass: The local game commission would take one look at where our house is and laugh. The pond covers an acre, and it's adjacent to probably 100 acres of woods split by a road. So it's not a question of one snake. I'm quite certain there are numerous snakes out there. I'd just like them to stay out there, where I'll leave them alone, and not encroach on my space, where I'll be forced to take them out. Thanks for the link, though. It at least gives me an idea.

 

Funny, I started typing -- a friend of mine said to put moth balls around your yard. Then, I thought, mmm .. I should google it and see what's out there. And, a lot of web pages/sites say moth balls don't do a damn thing:

Q: Is it true that moth balls, sulfur or lime keep snakes away?

A: No. There is no true snake repellent. Snakes don’t smell the way humans do, they literally taste the air with their tongues. If you sprinkle moth balls all around your house, the only thing you’ll keep away are the neighbors. The best you can do is deter snakes.

 

I'm deathly afraid of snakes, I hate the little bastards. doesn't matter if they are poisonous or not, I can't stand them. My sympathiesgo out to your wife n_w, because after that it would take a lot to get me to go in the back yard again, until there were assurances the problem had been taken care of. Irrational considering I'm 6'4" 290 pounds (I've lost 40 pounds since the new year!) abso frigginlutely, but still ... And don't even get me started on spiders.

 

Saw a spider climbing around my shower a handful of years back.
That MFer would have barely fit on a CD.
Took a nine iron to him ... he's resting peacefully in some sanitation park.

 

They're always in the worst possible spots I fucking hate them. God knows how I sleep with that fact flying around out there that we eat something like 7 spiders in our lifetime while we sleep.

 

I have a close friend, lets just call her Hot Filipino That I Can Never Have for short.

Anyways, she was doing a summer internship in the Florida Keys in 2003 and I went down for about five days. We're walking around the tiny key where Marathon is and she spots a snake. She's standing there, looking at it, thinking about picking it up and trying to talk to it. I have no idea what she said because I was ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuckin' hauling ass. I coulda' beat Ben Johnson, and I'm a smoker.

The next day, I come out of the bathroom and she's standing on the hotel bed as the very first Filipino albino.

Me, "what?"

Her, "Tha....there's... there uhh....KILL IT! KILL IT!"

Me, "Kill what?"

Her, "THAT! *now pointing*"

It was a spider about the size of your thumbnail. I stepped on it with a flipflop. Wow, how heroic.

I'll never be able to understand people who love snakes but completely spaz with spiders.