Moving to the country can mean having to deal with snakes; the key seems to be eliminating their main prey: mice

A rattlesnake (Photo by Meg Jerrard, Unsplash)

If you move from the city to the country, there are fewer people and a lot more animals; your rural happiness may depend on the kind of animals that decide to live around and in your new country home. Columnist Dana Milbank of The Washington Post writes how he and his wife moved to rural Virginia and discovered the tenacity of snakes as roommates: "There were no two ways about it. We were dealing with some real snakes. We found six snakeskins in the basement. We found 23 snakeskins in the attic — including one that was 6 feet long. Worse, one of the skins in the attic had belonged to a copperhead, a venomous pit viper whose bite is certain to ruin your day. . . . As a political reporter, I’ve observed plenty of snakes over my career. But out in the country, people actually like the critters. My neighbors informed me that common black snakes were a sign of good fortune."

Getting used to more 'critters' was one thing, getting rid of the snakes was the sticky wicket. Milbank asked Daniel Frank, director of Virginia Tech’s pesticide programs, "what to do about his snakes, mice and sundry insects. The first step after identifying and monitoring the critters, Frank told Milbank is that of 'determining thresholds.' In other words, decide 'what amount of damage or pest population you can live with'."

That was easy for Milbank, who writes, "When it comes to venomous copperheads in my house, I have calculated my threshold tolerance, and it is exactly zero. When it comes to harmless but 6-foot-long black snakes in my house, my tolerance is not much higher than zero."

Frank told Milbank not to waste his time "with electronic deterrents or herbal remedies. It isn’t practical to trap them, and it isn’t humane to kill them. The way to make the snakes vacate was to evict the mice," Milbank reports.

Tony Sfreddo, a director of the Virginia Pest Management Association, toured Milbank's house and had this to share: “I’ve seen worse." Sfreddo also suggested how to take care of randomly roaming snakes by "putting a wet towel on the floor, wait for the snake to wrap itself in the towel and then remove it," Milbank writes. "If I find a snake in my bedroom, I will immediately sign the deed of trust over to the squatting reptile and flee to the city — never to leave its concrete cocoon again."