Will Anything Keep Snakes Out Of Yards? 6/18/01

MANHATTAN, Kan. – Many people are embarrassed about it, so they say they’re just nervous. But they’d immediately identify with the Kansan who this year wrote to wildlife expert Charlie Lee:

I know that snakes are good rodent catchers, but I don’t want them in some areas. My wife is deathly afraid of them. Is there anything that will keep snakes away?

"You can’t buy a deterrent that will do the job. I hear a lot of people talking about trying moth balls or one of the commercial products that have moth balls as their major ingredient. Unfortunately, when researchers tested that idea in a room containing snakes, they found the products had absolutely no effect on where the snakes went," said Lee, who’s a wildlife specialist with Kansas State University Research and Extension.

* If you’re petrified, exclude snakes with something they can’t climb, such as a 36-inch high fence of small metal mesh (screening) or solid galvanized tin.

* If you really are just nervous, practice "negative habitat management." Or, just learn to appreciate snakes.

"All animals need four things: food, cover, water and space. If you don’t provide the things that meet snakes’ needs, they’ll tend to look elsewhere," Lee said.

What’s for Dinner?

If someone had to provide dinner for the vast majority of Kansas’ snakes, that caterer could forget any concerns about poisonous bites. The real worry would be coming up with such a broad cross-section of the state’s pests and small animals:

* The garter’s long stripes (sometimes combined with "checks") can look impressive. But this snake dines on commonplace insects, frogs, salamanders and earthworms.

* The state’s glossy black rat snakes (also called blacksnakes, although they’re sometimes rather gray with brownish blotches) are probably their world’s most effective rodent catchers. That’s one reason they can grow up to 6 feet long.

* The dark-colored water snake species in Kansas may sometimes act very aggressive, but all they look for in a meal is frogs and small fish.

* Kingsnakes – often a colorful yellow with little black flecks – dine on rodents, birds, reptile eggs and other snakes.

* The 15-inch or smaller ringneck is mostly black, yet known for its orange-red "collar." Its favorite meal is earthworms.

* Hognose snakes may look fat and have an upturned, snout-like nose. But they’re no joke while helping keep Kansas "critter" populations in check. They eat toads, frogs, eggs, lizards and other snakes. (Hognoses sometimes are called the puffed adder because when threatened, they’ll flatten their head, expand their unusually thick neck and hiss wildly. If that doesn’t work, however, hognoses can roll over and play dead, too.)

Source: K-State Research and Extension

In the Plains states, snakes think food means insects and/or small animals – which includes everything from bird eggs and tiny toads to wood rats and other snakes.

Many products to reduce insect numbers are available at garden and discount stores and even supermarkets. Bait controls for some small animal pests are easy to find, too.

"But if you’re going to keep rodents and similar varmints away over time, you may need to practice negative habitat management for them, too. For example, mice and rats are always going to be attracted to your yard if you have bird feed, cat or dog food, or small grain crops available," Lee said.

For snakes, good cover can be a life-and-death issue because they can’t regulate their own body temperature. That – combined with the fact they usually try to get out of the way if they "hear" a large animal coming – is one reason people don’t see snakes more often.

But humans’ odds for sightings increase if they buy a home near prime snake cover, such as rocky cliffs, streams and wooded areas. The odds increase even more if home landscaping itself provides cover possibilities.

"Most snakes need shady, damp places that are cool every year through the warm seasons when reptiles are most active," Lee said. "A landscape that doesn’t include such places will send snakes looking elsewhere."

To eliminate such cover, homeowners might need to severely prune shrubs, remove some trees, dry up boggy areas and fill in low spots.

"Keeping your lawn mowed short is another good idea," the specialist said. "That’s not only negative habitat management but also a way to see visiting snakes more easily, so you can avoid them.

"To keep snakes from being attracted to your garage or house – particularly during dry periods – another good practice is to have gravel, rather than dense vegetation next to all buildings and to seal all cracks and openings. That will eliminate snakes’ cover and traveling space, as well as reduce the potential for termites and other insects."

Lee believes many people have only learned enough to fear snakes. But, if they’d take time to know snakes better, people would become more confident about coexisting in a world with reptiles, plus learn how to appreciate snakes’ role as a natural pest control.

Kansas, for example, has a number of non-poisonous snake species that will bite humans – but no more often and for no other reasons than a raccoon or fox would bite. The state has only two kinds of poisonous snakes, both of which are fairly easy to recognize:

* The rattlesnake (with the timber rattler predominant in the extreme east, the "pygmy" massasauga in the eastern two-thirds, and the prairie rattler – now often called the western rattlesnake – in the west).

"We’ve had a few isolated reports of water moccasins and western diamondback rattlesnakes, but officials suspect those snakes were brought in – probably to be passed off as something new for the record book. Kansas isn’t prime habitat for them," Lee said.

Killing nonpoisonous snakes is against the law in most states, including Kansas. Keeping that law can be complicated, however, because recognizing a state’s "good" snakes can be difficult.

Some snake species change as they age, Lee pointed out. Young copperheads, for example, have a sulfur-yellow tail after they’re born in August or September, but it gradually becomes their body color.

"Overall, I think copperheads also come in more shades than any other species," he said. "They can be a dark bluish-gray that almost makes them look like a harmless water snake, because the snake’s well-known hourglass markings become hard to see. I’ve also seen copperheads that were a sort of pink, with reddish-brown cross-band markings."

Beyond that, many snake characteristics can occur in both poisonous and nonpoisonous species. Nonpoisonous snakes have heads with large, plate-looking scales, but copperheads and massasauga rattlers do, too. The harmless hognose snake can make so much noise that it sounds much like a rattler (which may not always rattle).

Fortunately, Lee said, three things always are true for those trying to identify native Kansas snakes:

2. Heads that look like an oval or cylinder belong to harmless snakes. Some nonpoisonous snakes and ALL poisonous snakes have big "jaws" that make their head look like a triangle.

3. Harmless snakes’ eyes have round pupils. Poisonous snakes have "cat’s eyes" with a vertical, slit-looking pupil, and they have an indentation or "pit" between each eye and nostril.

"If you’ve done a good job of negative habitat management, however, you should never have to be close enough that you could examine a snake’s eyes," Lee said.

K-State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well-being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county Extension offices, experiment fields, area Extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K-State campus, Manhattan.