Snakes in a House

Oh lordy ~ what a day.

Last night my om called me, in a full blown panic attack. She was sitting on her screened in porch when she heard the slither of a very large snake across the ceiling and the vent above her head.

Let me just say at this point, my mom is categorically TERRIFIED, PETRIFIED, PHOBIC of snakes. She has been battling snakes outside for a while now. She claims to have seen a 7 foot snake in the yard recently. Quite frankly, I’m surprised she hasn’t moved yet, that’s how scared she is of snakes.

So now she hears this snake slithering around above her head. She then realized that there is a heating vent in the wall of the living room that has never gotten repaired after a bout of remodeling. Now she’s CERTAIN the snake is going to climb down the wall and out the hole and … well who knows what. Safe to say, she’s not going back in the house.

Luckily it’s not the middle of winter, and her porch is quite nice, and not really a bad place to be. She calls me and wants to know what she should do.  Hell if I know. I wanted to tell her she should have let my husband kill the damn snake when it was still outside.

Here’s the thing about my mom.  It’s something I love and admired about her, and yet the same thing that makes me not understand her at all. She wouldn’t let any harm come to the snake. We couldn’t just kill it and be done with it. Noooo, one of nature’s creatures, it must not be harmed.  I get that, really I do. However, for the entire spring she was afraid to leave the porch because the snake was living under it, and at times would enjoy climbing the screen, just to remind her he was there. Now she can’t leave the go in the house because the damn snake’s inside! So the snake is all kinds of happy and my mom is a prisoner in her own home. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

So today she is supposed to be coming over to look online for some good snake traps. They have apparently picked up these little glue trap things and I don’t know how well that’s going to work for this big of a snake.

Oh I forgot to mention ~ we kind of thought she was exaggerating about the size of this snake. However, my husband redid her roof after a particularly bad hail storm, and when they pulled the sheeting off the roof he found not one, but two huge snake sheds. He said the bigger one was at least 7 foot. 🙁 So this means that snake as been up there all along ~ and there are TWO 7 foot snakes running around over there, or the snake has been coming and going at will, living a happy life in her attic. Either way sucks.

So back to the trapping. These little glue traps are like a pizza box with a strip of glue on them. The snake slides in and gets stuck. Then I guess you  spray the snake with Pam and it can loosen itself off to be released (and come right back ~ oops did I say that?). I think this snake is way to big for that ~ but they’ve read somewhere you can get a piece of plywood and put a few of these traps together to make a bigger trap. oh who knows.

There’s a site we found online that has “live traps” for snakes. They’re pretty similar to live traps for any other animal, but they have a funnel instead of a door so they can’t get back out.  They have a variety of sizes of traps. The biggest one is the only one that will fit the supposed size of this snake ~ and it’s $150!

WOW ~ as a marketer ~ I get to thinking, this is a desperate market ~ those who are terrified of snakes and have one in their yard or house and NEED to get rid of it. hmmm. . . that gets me thinking ~ anyway ~ I digress.

So I don’t know what’s going to happen, I talked to her this morning, and she sounded exhausted. Hopefully this problem will find a resolution soon, I’ll let you know how it goes ~ if you have any hints I’d be glad to pass them on.