Tag: yard

The Great Snake Chase

Max was worried about lizards.  Little did we know!

Yesterday, I was on the phone with the girl from the radiology lab and went out to the garage to get something from my car.  As soon as I entered the garage, I saw a snake between our two cars.  I yelped into the phone, “There’s a snake in my garage, I’ll have to call you back.”  The girl from the radiology lab was suitably impressed and agreed that dealing with the snake took precedence over retrieving my mother’s Medicare number.  During this exchange, the snake was quickly slithering to a hiding place beneath Max’s car.  I yelled for Max to get his car keys and come help me.  He came, but without his keys, to see what the problem was.  He didn’t seem too keen to get into his car with the snake underneath it.  I opened the garage door, in the hopes that the sweet smell of freedom would entice the snake out of my living space.  I grabbed a broom and tried to roust the snake from its position.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t see beneath the car and move the broom at the same time, so all I succeeded in doing was chasing the snake back towards the door to the house instead of towards the garage door.

 The snake was huge and menacing.  Well, at least to me, he was huge and menacing.  To be clear, it was a tiny little garter snake and no real danger to anyone or anything.  Still, it freaked me out to have it in my garage. 

 After fleeing from beneath the car, he coiled in a corner behind a bookshelf.  We tried spraying him with a number of substances and trying to push him closer to the garage door, but he pretty much stayed put in a fairly inaccessible corner behind the heavy bookshelf.  We’d get him to move down a few inches and then he’d pop back into the corner.  Then, he disappeared.  I have no idea where he went.  It was eerie.  Now you see him; now you don’t. 

 Since we had proven to be inept at snake removal, I decided to call in a professional.  Never having needed a critter exclusion company (yes, that is what they are called) before, I was at a loss.  I tried calling our pest control company.  Their definition of “pest” was fairly limited.  Apparently, in their lexicon, a snake is not a pest.  Who knew?  They explained that snakes are so fast and furtive, it is usually impossible to find them if you don’t have eyes on them all the time.  They did recommend another company whose technicians apparently sit by the phone waiting for critter calls and drop everything to save the day when someone calls for service.  In my mind, the whole operation sounds like a scene from Ghostbusters.  At any rate, they rush to your home because they, too, believe that there is little or no chance of finding the snake after about an hour or so.  News flash… you pay whether they find the snake or not.  Color me not surprised. 

 The technician came and he was very nice.   There were a lot of “yes ma’am’s” going on.  He carried a long, heavy pair of tongs (which I am sure would have been overkill if he had, in fact, actually found the snake).   He did pretty much what we had already done, except for the panicking part.  He kicked around everything in the garage.  He peered behind things with a flashlight.  No snake.  Our technician could not even theorize about where the snake could have gone.  He refuted all the possibilities I mentioned.   He was marginally reassuring in that he confirmed that it had to be just a little garter snake and would find its way out when it was hungry or thirsty, if he had not already vacated the premises.  The technician looked at the garage door and identified a couple of places where the door didn’t absolutely reach the floor of the garage.  They were tiny, itsy bitsy holes, but he theorized that the snake might have entered through these points.  He suggested we get a garage door guy to come in and fix the seal and he put down some sticky snake traps. 

 That night, I did not sleep much.  I left the light on because I could not rid my mind of the idea that the garter snake was going to somehow get into the house, wind his way back to my bedroom, and wiggle up onto my bed.  The technician assured us that the snake could not climb more than about four inches, but I’m a skeptic. 

 The next morning, when I tentatively entered the garage to get into my car, I saw that there was a “mass o’ snake” on one of the traps.  Truth be told, it didn’t look exactly like the snake I saw the day before, but I rationalized that it might be just that this snake seemed to be upside down and the belly might have been a different color than the topside I saw as it slithered around.  Seeing the snake on the trap, I assumed it was an ex-snake, dead from the combination of stuff we sprayed on him and the trauma of being unable to extricate itself from the trap.  Later, though, Max went out and saw that there were actually two snakes on the trap and they were alive and kicking.  He tried to dispose of them with a rake, but they headed in different directions.  He was able to kill one and the other dispatched into the front lawn.

 Many of you are probably horrified that we were trying to kill the snakes.  I know, I know.  They are harmless.  They are good for the environment.  They were there before people were.  I get all that.  I just don’t want to live with them.  Once they encroach into my living space, it is war!  First, anyone living in my home except me should be paying rent.  Secondly, I have a finely tuned startle reflex.  I can barely handle the phone ringing unexpectedly without jumping.  The random sight of wiggling snakes does nothing good for my blood pressure.  Those snakes creep me out. 

The garage door guy came yesterday and fixed the door.  It would seem that there are no more access points. I prayed vigorously for the intervention of St. Patrick, who I am assuming must be the patron saint of snake removal.   We have had no more snake sightings since then.  However, I still can’t let it go.  I’m hoping that a few more snakeless days will reduce the adrenaline and cortisol rushing continuously through my body.  In the meantime, I’m sleeping with a rolled up towel under my bedroom door!

Anyone else have any critter exclusion stories to share?  Please share your perspective by leaving a comment.  In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com.  In the meantime, here’s hoping for a reptile-free day for all of us!

Terri 🙂

Lions and Tigers and Lizards…. OH MY!

When the realtor first showed us the house I ended up buying, she pointed towards the beautiful green conservation zone behind the house.  She explained that it meant there would be no more houses built behind us and waxed poetic about the gorgeous view.  Then she said,

“Terri, you’ll have WILDLIFE!”

Almost as soon as the words passed her lips, she changed the subject, as if she immediately realized that the existence of wildlife in the backyard would not be everyone’s cup of tea. She needn’t have worried. I immediately conjured up visions of Bambi and Thumper shyly inching their way to my back door, as I coaxed them ever forward with carrots.  Maybe I’d even build a saltlick.  I saw them giving me their trust and nuzzling against me.  In my imagination, the wildlife might even have broken into song.

Well, no.

Instead of Bambi and Thumper, the wildlife consists of birds and lizards.  Lots of lizards.  The birds are pretty innocuous, although kind of noisy at times.  We have what must be wonderful windows and insulation because it can be quiet as can be inside until I open a door in the evening.  Then, the volume and variety of bird sounds is quiet amazing.  The cacophony they create outside at night is comparable to a middle school orchestra tuning up.  The birds are kind of cool to watch during the day and I can’t hear them at night with the doors and windows closed up, so the bird wildlife is not a problem.

The lizards didn’t really bother me, either.  Most people will tell you that lizards are good to have around because they eat insects.  I don’t want them in my house, but I’m perfectly happy to live and let live as long as they do their living outside the structure where I do my living.  Max, on the other hand, became the great white hunter of lizards.  He was completely convinced that, if we did not do something to banish the lizards from our property, they would take over the garage and house.  He fretted that, once in the house, we would not be able to get them out because they are such fast little buggers.  He worried that they would raise a whole colony of baby lizards and I would rue the day I ever said, “they don’t bother me.”  I think he pictured them taking over the television remote control and fiddling with the air conditioner settings.

My research into lizard control told me that nothing can reliably reduce lizard population.  The most common suggestion was to get a cat, which I thought might be a good answer until I realized that the cat would not necessarily get rid of lizards, just kill them and bring them to me as love offerings.  While I don’t want live lizards in my house, I really don’t want dead ones either.  Especially dead ones gift-wrapped in cat spit.

Another big suggestion was to use insecticides to kill the bugs the lizards eat, thereby discouraging the lizards from showing up for the buffet at our house each day.  After trying several different insecticides and putting out mothballs to minimize the bugs, there might have been a slight decrease in the lizard sightings.  Or there might not have been.

Max followed the lizard abatement school of thought that we should minimize (read eliminate) the foliage around the house, thus destroying the lizard hiding places. He thought we should have more rock and stone instead of dirt and shrubbery.   He thought we should cut all the shrubbery down to the stumps and maybe put out some potted artificial plants. Besides being a lot of work and expensive to have someone do this, I didn’t want to do it.  First, I didn’t think the homeowners’ association that objected to a small patch of discolored lawn would be too keen on landscaping that consisted of bare stumps topped with potted plastic petunias.  The rules for landscaping are pretty restrictive.  Second, I didn’t want an ugly yard and I have to say that stumps sounded pretty ugly to me.  Third, I didn’t think anything we did was going to get rid of the lizards so I objected to taking extraordinary measures to try to do so.

While our disagreement on lizard abatement strategy waged on, Max took to looking for lizards in the front and back yard and dousing them with glasses of cold water.  He’d go outside, see a lizard, come in grumbling, “fucking lizards,” get a glass of water, and throw the water on said lizard.  I’m sure the neighbors were referring to him as the “crazy lizard guy.”  He really believed he was going to train the entire lizard population to stay away from our house because those who were foolish enough to venture near would spread the word to the rest of them about the icy showers that awaited them.

Finally, after weeks of Max “convincing” (in other words, nagging) me to do something about the landscaping, I capitulated.  I just couldn’t bear to hear another word about the “fucking lizards.”  I did insist, though, that we were not just going to lop off shrubs and leave stumps in the ground.  I called a landscaper and explained our goal of mitigating the lizard population.  I basically let Max make all the decisions about what the landscaper should do so he could be satisfied that all possible means were being employed to eliminate the lizards. I just kept veto power to ensure that the yard did not end up looking like a bomb site. The landscaper told us he could not eliminate the lizards, but could do some things to minimize them, like taking out a couple of bushes and replacing them with a certain kind of tree that would be less hospitable to lizards.  He also suggested covering some of our bare dirt with stones and ornamental rocks. Of course, none of this was cheap, but I thought it would look nice when it was done.  Whether it would have any impact on the lizard population, I wasn’t too sure. Personally, I would have thought that decorating the yard with large ornamental rocks would be somewhat akin to building a habitrail for reptiles, but what do I know?

Now that the work has been done, it does indeed look nice.  I’m very proud of it.  Did it get rid of the lizards?  The dirty little secret is that I don’t think it did.  Max says it did, but I’m sure he doesn’t want me to realize that I paid a lot of money, at his insistence, to fix a problem that still exists.  I still see him going out of the house with tumblers of water to throw on the invaders.  The thing is, now he does it very surreptitiously and without a word about the “fucking lizards.”

So I got what I paid for.

What are your thoughts?  Please share your perspective by leaving a comment.  In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com. 

Have a wonderful day!

Terri 🙂