Snakes are relatively shy creatures that tend to avoid human contact and mostly keep to themselves. But sometimes you need to know how to get rid of snakes in your yard, or encourage them to go elsewhere. Usually, when snakes wiggle into gardens and yards, it indicates that something else is afoot, like an overpopulation of rodents. If you’ve been struggling with slithering snakes, here's how to address the underlying issues that are drawing snakes to your yard so you can get rid of them for good.
Garden Snakes: Friend or Foe
While venomous snakes should be removed from gardens by professional pest control companies for safety reasons, it’s not always necessary to remove non-venomous snake species, like rat snakes and garter snakes. Snakes don’t damage plants or landscaping, and they benefit gardens by gobbling up voles, mice, rats, slugs, and other pests that damage plants.
Whether you choose to remove or coexist with snakes is a matter of personal choice, but if you’re dealing with non-venomous snakes that aren’t causing trouble, you may want to leave them right where they are.
Most snakes in North America are non-venomous. However, if you’re in doubt about a snake ID, contact a professional to identify the types of snakes visiting your garden.
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Signs of Snakes
You may sometimes spot snakes slipping quietly through tall grasses or sunning themselves on flagstones or flat rocks on hot summer days. However, because snakes generally avoid human contact, you might have snakes on your property and never notice. These subtle signs indicate snakes might be around even if you never see the scaly serpents.
- Small holes. Snakes don’t dig their own tunnels, but they sometimes commandeer burrows abandoned by small mammals like chipmunks and gophers. If you spot small, 1- to 2-inch-diameter holes in your yard, they might harbor sleeping snakes.
- Snake skins. As they grow, snakes naturally shed their skins, and those papery skins can sometimes be found snagged on sticks and rocks or heaped into piles in backyard chicken coops. This is a sure sign that snakes are near.
- Droppings. Snake scat typically looks like an elongated tube that closely resembles bird droppings. While this isn’t the clearest sign of snakes, it can help you identify spots that snakes visit often.
- Serpentine tracks. Traveling snakes may leave behind slithering trails pressed lightly into tall grasses or the surface of dusty or muddy spots in the garden. These trails can be hard to spot and are much shallower than excavated vole tunnels.
- Disappearing chicken eggs. Although snakes typically eat insects, rodents, and small frogs, they sometimes sneak into backyard chicken and duck coops and eat a few eggs. Unfortunately, hungry snakes sometimes eat young chicks and ducklings and target fish ponds.
Tips for Getting Rid of Snakes in Your Yard
Snakes usually move into gardens with ready sources of food, water, and shelter. So, if you want to get rid of snakes, the best tactic is to reduce the resources that are drawing snakes into your yard in the first place. By making your property less hospitable to serpents, you encourage snakes to move elsewhere and eliminate the need for costly pest control professionals.
1. Remove Food Sources
Snakes invade most commonly because they’re hunting for prey, such as rodents and slugs. By addressing these pest issues directly, you can naturally reduce snake populations and protect your garden from pests at the same time.
If you’re dealing with a rodent problem, reduce access to food resources by keeping chicken feed in pest-proof feeders and stowing bird feeders away for a time. Row covers, fruit protection bags, and companion planting all deter birds, mammals, and insect pests that damage garden plants and attract snakes. If you have a fish pond or backyard chickens, add a pond cover and install extra hardware cloth over weak spots in your chicken coop to shelter koi fish, chickens, and eggs from hungry snakes.
2. Reduce Water Access
While snakes are attracted to ponds, fountains, and other water sources, leaky garden faucets and dripping hoses also attract slugs, snails, frogs, and other prey animals that snakes feed on. Protecting ponds with study covers is one way to make your garden less welcoming to snakes, but don’t forget to repair faucet leaks and replace old hoses, too. You may also want to temporarily put away your bird bath and switch to watering your garden in the morning to encourage unwanted snakes to journey elsewhere for a drink.
The Best Garden Hoses, Tested by BHG
3. Eliminate Shelters
Rock piles, leaf and brush piles, stacks of firewood, uncovered compost bins, tangled garden hoses, large stones, and overgrown trees and shrubs can all attract snakes and their prey. The good news is you can eliminate these sheltering spots by cleaning up garden debris, cutting back overgrown plants, and storing your hose in a neat hose hanger.
You may also want to close up crawlspaces and holes around the perimeter of your home, deck, and potting shed with hardware cloth or expandable spray foam—after making sure animals aren’t hiding inside those crawlspaces.
4. Mow Often
Wild lawns serve as habitats for songbirds and pollinators, but they also provide hiding spots for snakes and rodents. If you want to encourage snakes to move along, trim your lawn regularly and keep your grass short. Snakes feel more exposed to predators in short grass, which discourages nesting.
5. Attract Predators
Hawks and owls are apex predators that feed on many types of wildlife, including snakes. Attracting these predatory birds to your yard by installing owl houses and reducing nighttime light pollution can keep snake populations in check and reduce rodent problems. Avoid using rodenticides on your property, as poisoned baits can harm birds of prey as well as rodents.
6. Install Fencing
Fences aren’t the most obvious solution for snakes, but they can keep snakes from sliding into your garden, pool, or other water features. Since snakes hug the soil with their slithering bodies, fences don’t need to be tall, but they should be buried 3 to 4 inches beneath the soil to discourage digging. A ¼ inch hardware cloth fence about 3 feet high is all you need to deter most snakes and some small rodents.
7. Use Deterrents
While many folk remedies allegedly deter snakes, most of these solutions simply don’t work, and some can harm snakes and other wildlife. However, studies have found that lava rock can be an effective deterrent against snakes when it’s applied in a 2- to 3-foot-wide ring around the perimeter of homes and gardens. Snakes don’t like nesting on the sharp corners of lava rock and are unlikely to stick around areas where lava rock is present.
8. Try a Trap
If you know that you have a non-venomous snake on your property and a general idea of where the snake is nesting, you can use a live trap to catch the snake and relocate it elsewhere. Use a chicken egg or a piece of fish as bait, check the trap regularly so the snakes don’t stay confined for long, and follow local rules and regulations regarding trapping and relocation. Never use glue traps to capture snakes, as these traps are inhumane and often harm non-target animals like songbirds.
9. Call a Professional
Using a professional pest control company is the only safe way to remove venomous snakes from your property. However, you can also call a professional to trap and relocate non-venomous snakes if you don’t want to tangle with a serpent on your own. Pest control technicians may also recommend other treatment methods to tackle rodent problems to ensure snakes don’t return in search of food.
