- 5 hours ago
That solar snake stake in your yard is not protecting anything, and this calm, practical narration explains why. The real issue is not the buzzing plastic spike in the grass, but what is attracting snakes in the first place: food, shelter, and easy access around homes, barns, sheds, and chicken coops.
Drawing on a grandfather’s lesson from a corn crib, the speaker breaks down why snake repellents, ultrasonic devices, and sulfur or naphthalene granules fail, and why they can even create new problems. Instead, he focuses on what actually works: reducing rodents, storing feed correctly, cleaning up spilled grain, managing water, raising firewood, trimming grass, sealing gaps, and protecting crawl spaces, vents, and doors. He also explains how to tell harmless snakes from dangerous ones, when to back away, and why most bites happen when people try to kill or handle a snake.
This is practical homestead advice, snake prevention guidance, and rural pest control commentary for anyone dealing with snakes around the house, barn, or chicken coop. It also fits searches for snake repellent myths, rodent control, wildlife safety, and home exclusion tips.
SEO: narrated homestead advice, snake control, snake prevention, snake repellent myths, rodent control, chicken coop snake safety, crawl space exclusion, barn pest control, and practical rural home maintenance for people who want real answers instead of gimmicks.
Drawing on a grandfather’s lesson from a corn crib, the speaker breaks down why snake repellents, ultrasonic devices, and sulfur or naphthalene granules fail, and why they can even create new problems. Instead, he focuses on what actually works: reducing rodents, storing feed correctly, cleaning up spilled grain, managing water, raising firewood, trimming grass, sealing gaps, and protecting crawl spaces, vents, and doors. He also explains how to tell harmless snakes from dangerous ones, when to back away, and why most bites happen when people try to kill or handle a snake.
This is practical homestead advice, snake prevention guidance, and rural pest control commentary for anyone dealing with snakes around the house, barn, or chicken coop. It also fits searches for snake repellent myths, rodent control, wildlife safety, and home exclusion tips.
SEO: narrated homestead advice, snake control, snake prevention, snake repellent myths, rodent control, chicken coop snake safety, crawl space exclusion, barn pest control, and practical rural home maintenance for people who want real answers instead of gimmicks.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00There is a plastic stake pushed into a lawn somewhere right now with a little solar panel
00:05on the top of it buzzing away every 30 seconds and the man who put it there believes it is
00:11keeping
00:12snakes off his place. It is not. It has never kept a snake off anything. It is a nine dollar
00:20battery
00:20in a spike making a noise into the dirt and the snake you are worried about will go straight past
00:27it over it and in some cases lie against it because it is warm. I am Elias Yoder and I
00:35am not going to
00:36spend this whole video telling you a thing does not work because that is only half an answer and
00:42half an answer is no use to anybody. What I want to tell you is why the snake is on
00:48your place at all
00:49because once you know that you will understand both why the stake cannot work and what will.
00:57My grandfather taught me this in the corn crib and he taught it by stopping me. I was about 13
01:04and I
01:04had gone in for a scoop of corn and there was a black snake up in the crib, a big
01:09one, four feet and more
01:11of him draped along the boards and I came back out for the hoe. He took it off me, not
01:17roughly, he just
01:19took it and leaned it against the wall. Then he asked me when I had last seen a rat in
01:24that crib.
01:26I had to think about it and the answer was that I never had. He said that was not luck
01:32and it was
01:33not the cat and then he asked me who I thought had been doing that work. A thing does not
01:40come to your
01:40place for you. It comes for what you left out. I gathered the whole of it into a book at
01:47Elias Yoder
01:48dot com. The book is the long version. If you want it, it is there. I will not mention it
01:56again.
01:57Now, why the stake cannot work, and I want to correct something that gets said about this even by people
02:04who are right about the conclusion. You will hear that snakes cannot feel vibration. That is not true
02:12and it is worth knowing why. A snake has no ear on the outside of its head, but it is
02:19far from deaf to
02:20the ground. It picks up what happens in the earth through its jaw and it is sensitive to it. That
02:27is
02:27exactly why a snake is gone before you get to it when you walk up a path. It felt you
02:33coming through
02:34the ground long before it saw you. So the stake is not failing because the snake cannot feel it. The
02:42snake
02:42feels it perfectly well. It is failing because a small steady buzz every half minute in the same spot
02:50forever means nothing. It does not come closer. It never turns into anything. Any animal alive
02:59stops responding to a signal like that within an hour or two, the same way you stop hearing a clock
03:05in a room you have been sitting in. Your footstep means something is coming. A spike in the dirt means
03:13nothing is coming. Over and over. And the snake learns that faster than you would like. And the things
03:20that actually matter to a snake, the snake does not touch at all. Snakes work by smell above everything,
03:28which they do with the tongue, flicking it out and bringing the air back to a sense organ in the
03:34roof of
03:35the mouth. That is how one finds a mouse run, and how one finds another snake, and how one finds
03:42its
03:42way back to where it overwintered last year. The rattlesnake and the copperhead have heat sensing on
03:49top of that, pits on the face that read a warm body in the dark. None of that is affected
03:56by a buzz.
03:57You have not hidden the mice, you have not covered the trail, and you have not made the wood pile
04:03less
04:03comfortable. You have put a noise in a field. The ultrasonic boxes are the same argument with less
04:11excuse, because you cannot even hear those to be reassured by them, and the business of selling them
04:17has been in trouble more than once over what it claims. And then there are the granules,
04:23crystals, the bags of crystals sold to be scattered round a house. Those are usually naphthalene,
04:30sulfur, or both. They do not work either. But these ones I want you to leave alone for a different
04:37reason. Naphthalene is what mothballs are made of, and it is poisonous, and scattering it round a yard
04:44where children play and dogs go is a genuinely bad idea. Mothballs get into children every year in this
04:51country, and it is not a small matter when it happens. Using them loose outdoors is also not
04:58what they are sold and approved to do. So, the spike does nothing, the box does nothing, and the crystals
05:07do nothing and are a hazard besides. That is the hole of the aisle. Now the part that is worth
05:14your evening.
05:14A snake is not on your place because of you, and it is not there by accident. It is there
05:21because there
05:21is something to eat and somewhere to hide, and if you take those two away, it has no reason to
05:27stay,
05:28and it will go. Food first, and for nearly every snake you will see around a house and a barn,
05:34the food
05:35is rodents. So the snake is not your problem. The snake is the symptom. If you have snakes around the
05:42buildings in any number, what you have is mice, and you probably have more of them than you think,
05:48because mice are quiet and snakes are not. Which means the real work is the feed and the grain and
05:55the rubbish. Feed in bins with lids that shut, not in bags on the floor. Spilled grain swept rather than
06:03left. Bird seed in a tin, because a bird feeder is a mouse feeder with extra steps, and it is
06:10the commonest
06:10one people miss. Dog food indoors. Fruit picked up from under the trees. A compost heap that gets turned
06:19rather than one that sits. Do that properly for a season, and the snakes thin out on their own,
06:25without you doing one thing about the snakes. And water counts as well, which people forget. A dripping
06:32outside tap. A bucket that never gets emptied. A low place that holds after rain. In a dry spell,
06:39that is the busiest corner of your property, and everything comes to it. The mice first,
06:45and then what follows the mice. One thing on the rodent work that matters more than it sounds.
06:51Use traps rather than poison. A poisoned mouse does not go off quietly and die in a hole.
06:58It goes slow and stupid out in the open for a day or two, which makes it the easiest meal
07:04on the place,
07:04and then whatever eats it gets the dose. That is the barn owl, the cat, the fox, and the very
07:12snake that
07:12was keeping your numbers down for nothing. So you pay for the poison, and then you take out the things
07:18that were doing the job for free. And in a year or two, you have more mice than you started
07:23with,
07:24and nothing left to eat them. Traps are more trouble, and they only kill what they catch.
07:30Second is the hiding, and this is where most places lose it, because cover is the thing a snake
07:37wants most, and it is the thing we leave lying about without thinking. A wood pile stacked straight
07:43on the ground is the best snake lodging in the county. Get it up on rails or blocks so there
07:49is air
07:50under it, and you can see beneath. A sheet of old tin lying in the grass, boards stacked flat,
07:57a pile of brush, an old tire, a heap of rock. Every one of those is a dark, warm space
08:03with mice in it.
08:05Grass let go right up to the foundation as cover as well, and so is thick ground planting against
08:11the house wall. Keep a moan strip round every building. A snake crossing open ground is exposed
08:17and does not like it, and a snake that does not like it goes somewhere else. And a rock wall
08:23is a
08:23different matter, because a rock wall is a snake hotel, and always has been. And if you have a nice
08:30old one, I would not pull it down for this. Just know what it is, and keep it away from
08:35the door.
08:36There is one building that is its own problem, and if you keep hens you already know which one I
08:41mean.
08:42A chicken house has everything a snake wants in it at once. Warm, dark, full of bedding,
08:49spilled feed bringing mice in, and eggs lying there in a row. A rat snake will take eggs and will
08:56take a
08:56small chick, and once one has found a coop, it will keep coming back, because a snake remembers a
09:02good place far better than people credit. The answer is not to sit up with a light. It is the
09:08same three
09:09things in a smaller building. Hardware cloth over every vent and window, quarter inch, stapled properly,
09:16and not just tacked at the corners. A solid floor or wire buried round the edge. Feed in a bin
09:23with a lid,
09:23and collect the eggs rather than letting them sit, because eggs left in the nest all day are an
09:29advertisement. If one is already coming, the surest way to know is to go out at dusk rather than in
09:36the
09:36morning, and look along the top of the wall where it meets the roof, because that is the road they
09:41use.
09:42Third is getting in, and here is the measure that surprises people. A snake can go anywhere its head
09:49fits. For most of what you will meet round a house, that is a gap about the thickness of a
09:54pencil, and if
09:55a mouse made the hole first, the snake can use it. So you go round the bottom of the house
10:01with your hand
10:02and your eyes. Where pipes and wires come through the wall. The gap under a door that is worn. The
10:09vent
10:09with the screen gone. The space where the siding stops short of the ground. Round the step, under the
10:16shed. Fill the small ones with steel wool packed tight and then sealed over, because a mouse will chew foam
10:23and caulk and will not chew steel. Cover vents with quarter inch hardware cloth, which is the size that stops
10:31a
10:31mouse and therefore stops what follows a mouse. Fit the door sweep. And do that now rather than in the
10:38spring, because of the time of year. Right about now and for the next few weeks, snakes are moving.
10:44They are looking for somewhere to spend the winter, and a cellar, a crawl space, the underside of a porch,
10:51and a gap into a wall all look like exactly what they are looking for. Nearly everybody who finds a
10:58snake in
10:58the house finds it in the autumn or on the first warm day of spring, when it is trying to
11:03get back out.
11:05Seal it in October, and you have shut the door before anybody tried it. Seal it in May, and you
11:11may
11:11have shut something in. That is worth a moment, because it is the one way this goes wrong. If you
11:18are sealing a cellar or a crawl space late, and you are not certain the place is empty, do the
11:23looking
11:23before the filling. Torch along the walls, into the corners, behind anything stacked, up where the
11:30joists meet the wall. A snake shut inside a crawl space does not politely starve out of sight. It comes
11:37up through the floor into the house looking for a way out, and then you have the same snake and
11:42a worse
11:43problem. Now the part my grandfather was teaching me with that hoe, and it is the one that costs people
11:49the most. Know what you are looking at before you do anything, because killing the harmless ones makes
11:55your snake problem worse rather than better. The black rat snake is the best mouser you will ever
12:01have on a place. Four, five, sometimes six feet of him, and he lives in barns and cribs and sheds,
12:09and he is there for one reason, and the reason is the thing you actually wanted gone. Kill him,
12:15and you have taken out the only thing working for nothing, and the mice come back, and the mice bring
12:20the next snake along, and that one may not be a rat snake. Same with the garter snake, and the
12:26milk
12:26snake, and the rest of the common sort. None of them want anything to do with you. In this state,
12:33there are three snakes that can hurt you, and that is the whole list. The timber rattlesnake, the northern
12:39copperhead, and the eastern massasauga, which is rare enough that most people here will live their lives
12:45and never see one. Everything else you meet in a Pennsylvania yard is harmless, and most of it is
12:51useful. If you want one thing to look at, look at the head and the eye from a safe distance
12:56and nowhere
12:57near it. Our two common venomous ones have a broad triangular head wider than the neck, an eye with a
13:05slit pupil like a cat, and a small pit between the eye and the nostril. The harmless ones have a
13:11narrow head
13:12running into the neck and a round pupil. But I will be plain with you. If you are close enough
13:18to be
13:18sure, you are closer than you want to be, and the better rule is simpler. Leave it alone, and it
13:24will
13:25leave. Which brings me to what to do when you do meet one. Stop. Step back. Give it room and
13:31let it go,
13:32because it would rather be elsewhere than near you, and in nearly every case, it will take the chance the
13:39moment you offer it. And I will say something about the fear itself, because it is real, and I am
13:47not
13:47going to talk anybody out of it. A snake is not hunting you. It has no interest in you at
13:53all,
13:54and you are far too big to be anything but a danger to it. What looks like it coming at
14:00you is almost
14:01always it trying to get past you to the cover it was heading for. And what looks like it standing
14:08its
14:08ground is an animal that thinks it has nowhere to run. Give it the gap, and it takes it. That
14:15is the
14:16whole of their nature where people are concerned. Do not try to kill it. I will tell you the reason
14:23that matters more than anything about being kind to animals. Most people who get bitten in this country
14:30get bitten while trying to kill or handle a snake. The snake on the far side of the yard is
14:37not the
14:37danger. The man walking toward it with a shovel is the danger, and he is the one the ambulance comes
14:44for. If it is inside and you need it out, open a door, leave the room, and let it find
14:52its own way. Or put a
14:54bin over it and slide something flat underneath and carry it out. And if it is one of the three,
15:01and it is in the house, that is a call to somebody who does this for a living rather than
15:07a job for a
15:08Saturday. And do not put down glue boards or lay plastic netting in the garden. Both of them catch
15:16snakes, and neither kills them quickly. And you will come out one morning to something you have to deal
15:22with that you did not want to deal with. Now the plane limits. Doing all of this will not give
15:30you
15:30a yard with no snakes in it. There is no such yard anywhere that has grass, and anybody selling you
15:38one is selling you the spike. What it does is take away the reasons they stay, so you get the
15:45one passing
15:46through now and again instead of three living under the step. Some of this is slow. The rodent work takes
15:54a season to show. And if your place backs onto woods or a creek or a stone bank, you will
16:01have more snakes
16:02than the man in town, and no amount of tidying changes that. Tidy anyway. Fewer is the goal, not none.
16:13There is no scheme in any of it, though it is worth seeing how the shelf is arranged. A plastic
16:20spike
16:20is nine dollars, and it is sold on being frightened, and a bag of crystals is twelve, and a whole
16:28aisle
16:28of that stuff moves every spring on the strength of a worry rather than a result. Nobody can sell you
16:36a
16:36woodpile lifted onto blocks, or a lid on a feed bin, or a strip of grass kept mown, and those
16:44three will
16:45do more than every product in the aisle put together. My grandfather never bought a thing for snakes in
16:52his life. What he had was a crib with no rats in it, and the sense not to kill the
16:59reason why.
17:01Tell me in the comments whether you have one of those steaks in your yard right now,
17:06because I would like to know how many of you do, and whether you had ever thought about it until
17:11just
17:12now. And if you are new here, tell me what is nearest your buildings as well, woods or water or
17:20open
17:20field, because that one fact decides how much of this you need. Next time I want to get underneath the
17:29house, because you will have just gone round sealing every gap a mouse could use, and the one place
17:36nobody ever looks is where the house sits down onto its foundation, and I have owed you that one twice
17:43over. A thing does not come to your place for you, it comes for what you left out. The people
17:50who built
17:51this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.