Last week we were chasing a frog out of our house. I thought that was horrible, but this week's visitor was even worse as I found a snake on our back patio. Doug had said that he had seen a garter snake in the backyard several weeks ago, but this definitely was a lot bigger than that. It was all black with a thin head, almost five feet long. Since I scared him when I walked out the back door, he decided to try and scare me by raising up and hissing at me. I screamed and he slowly slid back to the west side of the house into a hole in the fence post.
I wasn't quite sure what to do, so I frantically spread all of the Snake Away that we had left around the fence line. It must have smelled as bad to him as it did me as I heard him thrashing around but never saw him come out of the fence post. I went inside and looked through the computer for more help. First, I identified the snake. It looked a black "rat" snake that fed on its name sake. I knew that Grandpa had a lot of those in Arcadia and most were twice as big as what I saw. I was glad to find out that that typed of snake was not venomous. The other option was a black racer which was pretty much the same but with a thinner head. Either way, the biggest issue would be to avoid scaring either type so as not to suffer a bite.
Needless to say, I was pretty jazzed up after my encounter. I probably went overboard in my reaction. I found out online that snakes did not like the smell of Epsom salt, so the yard that I did not cover with Snake Away was soon white with salt. I hoped that I would be relieved with all that I had done to scare the snake away, but instead I only felt more anxious about my encounter. After a lot more research, I decided to invest in a snake pole, reptile gloves and another bag of Epsom Salt. I knew it would take some time to recover from my encounter, but I did at least feel better about my chances of surviving another unwanted visitor.
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