When I went outside yesterday morning I found this guy caught in my trellis netting.
The rain yesterday brought a visitor.
A yellow bellied watersnake about 3 feet long.
I cut the netting away and released it in the ditch. There was no serious injury.
Last year, I found a dead Racer that entangled itself in some bird-proof netting I use on my peach trees. The net was stored in a corner of my workshop and, unfortunately,...it tried to crawl through the netting
and was snared,,,exactly like a fish is in a gill net. Its scales prevented it from backing out once it realized that the larger diameter of its mid-section wouldn't allow it to continue forward thru the net. It had been
snared long enought to starve.....sad! Wish I'd have found it earlier
We have a 4,000 gal water garden with a number of koi and several years ago I decided to cover the whole thing with deer netting in an effort to deter Herons from landing and having a go at the fish. Within one day a small garden snake got caught in the netting and my husband killed it (he is not fond of snakes). Every day for the next three days I found a different 3-4ft long snake of a (non-venomous) variety trapped in the netting. I hate killing things unnecessarily (except scorpions) so each time I grabbed my trusty hockey stick (we transferred to Texas from Minnesota) and a pair of garden scissors and while holding the head down with the hockey stick, I cut the little bugger out of his netting trap and then directed him toward the greenbelt on the other side of our fence. Two of the snakes were pretty calm but one, I believe it was an Eastern Rat Snake -- all black with a yellowish underbelly -- was not a happy camper and I was glad to have that stick to hold him down. After that I pulled up all the netting and bought a Scarecrow sprinkler to handle the Herons instead. Oddly enough, I haven't seen any other snakes since, except for a small garden snake with an orange stripe meandering through my mulch.
All black with a yellow belly was probably a Yellow bellied water snake like the one in my pictures above.
JulieJV ~ the snakes couldn't win. The net trapped them but the herons would have dined on them... Good for you with your patience although the snakes would also dine on the fish.
AJN -- you're probably right. As I recall I looked up a website with snake pics after the fact to try to identify it. It did look like the one in your photos.
Podster -- I never thought about the herons eating the snakes. Hmmmmm. As for the snakes getting the koi, ours are (and were at the time) fairly decent sized and I don't know how big a fish a snake can handle, but we probably had a number of much smaller offspring in the pond, not to mention the gazillion tadpoles which were probably a nice meal.
The first year the pond was installed, we used to sit near it at dusk and watch for a small blotched water snake to come out of the rocks near the waterfall and go skimming across the lily pads. He was only about 6 in. long. I think that was one I cut out of the netting a couple years later.
It must be 'that time of the year' for the snakes. I've seen 3 in my yard in the past few weeks (all non-poisonous), a turtle, tons of tree frogs, lizards and plenty of toads. A few nights ago, a nocturnal critter dug up a lot of my plants looking for grubs. I spent all morning replanting.
I've had 2 chicken snakes (one really big) and this cute little guy.
aj, thanks for sharing that. he sure was a beauty.
knolan, what kind of snake is that? he is cute.