Wet Winter Portends the Summer of Snakes

What You Can Do About It

Those of us in the pest control business here in southern California are bracing for an extra-busy dry season. The heavy rains from January to late March, which gave us those spectacular super blooms of California poppies, also fueled heavy growth of sage and grass. As a native of southern California, hiking my favorite trails past towering clumps of grass, I can’t recall a spring this lush.

But nature’s blessings always come with a price tag. The more water, the more everything.

All that extra vegetation, with its bounty of seed, means abundant food for insects, rodents, squirrels, and rabbits. It provides animals with abundant cover from raptors. It won’t, however, protect them from rattlesnakes. So a bumper crop of small prey this year sets the table for a bumper crop of snakes, a danger particular to neighborhoods that border brushy hillsides.

So far this spring, calls about rodent infestations have been running well ahead of last year. Customers express a heightened sense of urgency, citing the recent news that Los Angeles City Hall and some homeless encampments have been infested with typhus-carrying rats.

If you have a rodent problem, depending on where you live you may also have a rattlesnake problem you don’t know about, yet. When I hike these days, it’s always in sturdy calf-high boots and denim jeans. My kids know to stay away from bushes and overhangs where snakes tend to rest.

What to do? The green revolution notwithstanding, the go-to weapons still seem to be traps and poison. Traps are rarely effective, especially when people forget to check and reset them. Poisons, besides the risk to pets and children, are devastating to the entire food chain.

Rodents are the sardines of our ecosystem. They reproduce in huge numbers and are on the menu of every ground predator and raptor. Poison a mouse and you poison the snake that eats it. Poison a snake and you not only poison the fox or the hawk that eats it, you’ve also multiplied the supply of mice.

There are other, sustainable ways to manage pests without poisons. Those of us who do so are in the minority, for now. The challenge for the pest control industry in greening itself up is the intimate nature of what we do.

Customers typically come to us when they’re upset, creeped out, and anxious. They want quick, out of sight results that often aren’t sustainable. Integrated pest management, the name the industry has adopted for the approach we hope will one day become standard, is more complicated than a trap or a poison-bait box. Instead of poisoning, the goal is to repel.

For the past decade, my colleagues and I have been testing and refining the use of essential oils from cedar trees and other plant sources that act as repellents. Cedar has a long history in pest control. Native Americans used it in paste form to ward off mosquitoes and flies. Our parents and grandparents kept their woolens in cedar-lined chests, to protect them from moths. Your dog bed probably has cedar chips in it.

We’ve learned that the right mix of nontoxic essential oils is as obnoxious to many pest animals and insects as the smell of ammonia is to humans. Every case is unique, but typically we spray it on the soil around the perimeter of a property to create an invisible barrier. Where rattlesnakes are a problem we also install special fencing.

But for integrated pest management to work, humans need to do more than write a check to a pest control company. The single, most important element of pest control is water. When the dry season settles in, every living thing, even the ants, are looking for water. Humans have been obliging them with swimming pools, fountains, leaky hoses, irrigation systems, leaky indoor appliances — every water source has the potential to nurture an infestation.

What can you do? In addition to eliminating standing water and limiting other water sources, here are the basics of how to make your home and property less attractive to pests, and to help nature help you.

Keep trash in secure bags inside and put them in the cans on trash days.

Keep trash cans clean using strong or repellent soaps.

Put away the bird feeder. It and the debris around it are pest-animal magnets.

Never leave pet food outdoors. Mice love dried dog food and they’re known to create huge caches of the stuff under decks and crawl spaces, which in turn attracts ants.

Fallen tree fruit should be picked up promptly.

[Matthew A. Mills is president of Nature-Cide Pest Management in Canoga Park, California.]

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