Do You Have a Personal Snake Pit? I Do.

If you read  My Story, then you know that we have a snake pit located on the East side of our property. When we moved in five years ago, we were met with snakes everywhere. There were so many that we used rakes to gather them in piles and shovel them into barrels. Luckily, my husband and I aren’t scared of snakes, although we really would rather not have them around. We have worked hard to reduce the population so friends and family will visit us during the warmer months. We have successfully reduced the number of snakes we’ll see each day, but they are impossible to completely evacuate. They like it here. So I figure one of four things brought this situation on:

A) The people who owned this property prior to us were breeding snakes on purpose.

B) The people who owned this property prior to us didn’t care or were oblivious to the growing snake population.

C) All the neighbors are secretly dumping all their snakes on our lawn in the middle of the night.

D) The snakes didn’t used to live here, but chose to move in at the exact same time we did.

Each spring we go on a snake hunt, looking for snakes. Animal lovers, ear muff it. This helps a ton. We know where they like to lay: by the pit, along side the big rock in the front yard, by the front door step, in the pond they believe to be their own personal spa, and down in the ditch by the culvert. It is still a little early for the snakes to appear, but I took a walk around the yard to see if I could photograph any for you. I didn’t see any, but here’s a picture of “the pit”. During the summer, I hook up a little trailer on our tractor mower and take kids on snake tours. Visiting children love to see how many we can find. My kids enjoy this for a while, then they get tired of the snakes; walking past them not even bothering to point them out.