In our gardenshed we have a huge amount of firewood for the winter. Some is hardwood, the other softwood, all nicely stacked for airflow. It was a warm period in September. We were moving some more wood into the shed. Guess what is laying on top of the softwood pile? A garter snake. That is something I really don’t like very much. I respect them and don’t want to hurt them. And there were more. They were gliding through the gaps in between the wood. Baby snakes, at least another 6 or 7 about a foot long. Probably half of them we didn’t see. Does this snakepart belong to the same snake or is that another one?
Being not used to them at all and worried about bringing them in the house, we wanted to get rid of them. I did some research online and thought luring them out of the wood with food and then grabbing them and moving them into the forest would be a good plan. They came for the food, some worms I dug up and slugs, but grabbing them was another story. Gives me goosebumps thinking about it. I tried with gloves, but couldn’t get a grip. I succeeded with a stick on the biggest one. I managed to sneak it under the center of the body, lifted up and carefully balancing I managed to run away from the sheds with it. I lost it much too early. It was still on our property close to the waterfall we build. It went hiding under a huge rock. Later it snuck out from there to curl up in our decorative canoe.
From there I basically had no more luck. We waited and kept finding snake skin in the shed. We also noticed that something was chewing on our wood and had to empty it all out to find the source. We think it was carpenter ants, but we didn’t see any. We heard this gnawing sound in the shed and we had thought it was the snakes. I think it was a bug or carpenter ants chewing away in the wood. Wen moved all the wood out of the shed, we didn’t find any more snakes. GOOD. We got rid of all the dust from whatever creature was chewing on the wood, restacked the wood and it seems fine now. We now keep the wood for the wood stove in a closed large plastic container. Can’t have carpenter ants or whatever in the house!
Does anybody else know anything about how to protect the wood from insects destroying it? I think the snakes only came in there to do their shedding. It was nice and warm in there at the time. Anyone else with other snake stories?
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