Battle of the Species 2: Snakes

aka "I am ...tired of these ...snakes at this ...cabin!"

Last weekend, when I talked to Jesse, he said, “You are going to have a lot of unhappy snakes around here because of all the work we’ve done to the house!”

With an inspiration like that, for this second episode of “Battle of the Species,” we are not going to follow the precise order I laid out for the serial last month. Instead, I want to talk about the snakes. Consider this:

When we first opened the trap door to look down into the pump equipment for the pool, we saw a little baby ring neck snake wriggling around down there.

When we had the septic guys come out to do their thing, they said, “Ughh, hostas!” about our plantings, and explained that they are a favorite hiding place for copperheads. (They are also a favorite meal for deer, more about that in another post.)

When we opened the door that the previous owner had used to pass firewood through into the house, we found two 5-foot plus snake skins from old sheds.

When the workers pulled down the aluminum siding from the back of the house to reveal all the damage to those beams, besides the termite damage, they found countless old sheds up in the eaves. This means they over wintered in the roof of the house, in the section above the kitchen and dining room!

When Chris took down the old lean-to shed (earlier photos showed the carpenter bee damage to it), he found the former owner of the large 5-foot sheds referenced above. Fortunately, it was a black snake, and we were able to hold Chris back from attacking it with a garden hoe.

Our neighbor up the hill, a dedicated hunter with some very nice trophies on display in the cabin, had collected four six-foot sheds and had them on display in his collection.

I take heart from the fact that the largest snake we have found so far is a black snake – that means there will be fewer mice and bugs around, for one thing, but also, since these species all raid each other’s nests for the eggs and young, it probably means we’ll have few - or even better, none – copperheads.

We are going to have to address the hiding place in the fire wood trap door. Figure if they can get part of the way inside it, they can get all the way inside. In order to keep them out of the house we’re going to figure out how to seal it off.

Photos today include a flattened hog-nose snake – about a foot-long – that I saw out on the road on Saturday, and one of the sheds that came out of the roof flashing. If I have misidentified the hog-nose, I welcome your corrections.