Snake Removal in Auburn, GA

Snakes around your Auburn home

Auburn has snakes because it has what snakes want: cover and something to eat. On the Barrow side, fencerows, hay bales, rock piles, old outbuildings and tall grass at the field edges are full of mice and the snakes that hunt them. Where a new subdivision has been graded out of a field, the snakes that lived there don't vanish. Some end up in the nearest backyard, landscape timbers or garage. In the old core, overgrown lots and crawlspaces under older homes give them the same mix.

Two things are worth knowing before you react. First, most calls turn out to be harmless rat snakes, and only a small share involve anything venomous. Georgia has 47 native snake species and only seven are venomous, and around an Auburn home the venomous one to watch for is the copperhead. Second, every non-venomous snake is protected by state law, and killing one is illegal. A snake out in the yard will usually move on within a few minutes to an hour if you leave it alone. A snake inside is a different story.

Why snakes turn up along the county line

Snakes follow food and cover, and in Auburn both are concentrated at the line where yard meets field or woods. Mice move out of pasture and hay into sheds and garages, and the snakes follow them. Brush piles, stacked lumber, rock borders and thick ground-cover beds near the house give them somewhere cool to hide. A newer house backing onto open land gets more snake visits than one surrounded by other houses, simply because it's the first stop.

Most of what you see is harmless

The snake you're most likely to find around an Auburn home is a rat snake, a long, dark climber that eats mice, rats and sometimes eggs. Kingsnakes also show up, and they eat other snakes, including copperheads. Garter and brown snakes stay small and eat slugs and worms. All of these are protected. They also help: each one is free rodent control. That's why identification comes before anything else.

Copperheads in leaf litter and field edges

The copperhead is the venomous snake you might realistically meet here. Its tan-and-copper pattern blends into leaf litter, mulch, firewood and the brushy margin where a lawn runs into a fencerow. Copperheads are most active in warm weather and around dawn and dusk. If you see one, keep people and pets back and let a pro handle it. Don't try to move it or kill it. That's how most bites happen.

It's illegal to kill non-venomous snakes

Georgia protects its non-venomous native snakes, and killing one is a violation of state law. It's also risky. A snake can strike farther than people expect, and even one that looks dead can bite by reflex. A licensed pro removes and relocates non-venomous snakes without harming them and handles a venomous one with the right tools and distance. Most homeowners assume the worst about any snake they see, and in practice it's almost never venomous.

Snakes in the garage or crawlspace

A snake indoors needs a call right away. The longer you wait, the more likely it slips into a wall or a gap and can't be found. In Auburn, snakes usually get in through garage-door gaps, crawlspace vents with torn screens, and gaps around pipes, more often on older core homes and on newer homes that back onto open land. After removal, those openings get sealed and the mice that drew the snake in get dealt with.

What a pro does on a snake call

The pro identifies the snake, removes it safely, and then looks at why it came. That means checking for rodents, brush or wood stacked against the foundation, and open crawlspace or garage gaps. The advice afterward is simple: control the mice, keep overgrowth and stored material away from the house, and seal the low openings. Snake repellents, and mothballs especially, don't work and shouldn't be used.