I recently found two small garter snakes while hiking in a nearby forest. My fiancé and I decided to catch them and take them home. I read through your articles on caring for garter snakes and it has helped a lot helping me meet the needs of my snakes, although I am having trouble finding food that they will eat.

Before I read your article my fiancé swore they ate crickets though I know now that is not true.

I also tried small goldfish (alive in a rock bowl) but there was no reaction to them. One of the snakes poked its head in the water and went right past the fish. One of the fish died so I cut it up right away and tried to serve it to them that way and still nothing.

Someone also said they do not eat very often so I thought that may be why I couldn’t get them to eat anything.

I have not yet tried earthworms; the pet store was out of them when I tried to pick some up and pinkies are so expensive I was afraid I would spend money on them and they would be ignored as well.

I’m a little concerned that my snakes will die if I don’t find something they will eat soon. I have had them for about three and a half days now, and as far as I could tell they have not had anything to eat.

The pet stores in my area have been having problems with getting their shipments of fish in so no one has guppies and one place had minnows but refused to sell them when they heard it was for snake food.

I am all out of ideas other than drowning my lawn for worms.

Catching wild snakes involves a host of considerations that buyers of captive-bred snakes don’t usually have to face; the biggest of these is getting a recently caught snake to feed. (This is one big reason why most snake keepers recommend getting captive-bred animals wherever possible, incidentally.)

Not every wild snake settles down in captivity; some resolutely refuse to eat. For example, Eastern Milk Snakes in my area are notorious for refusing all food and starving themselves to death (although I did keep one for a few years that would eat). Now, before Liz gets any more alarmed, I should mention that it takes an adult snake several months to starve to death, so her two garter snakes are in no danger of immediate starvation.

Actually, garter snakes have a pretty good reputation for eating in captivity, so long as the right food is offered — and fortunately, most of them aren’t very fussy. By trying to find every food item that might be of interest to a garter snake, Liz is definitely on the right track.

Liz did not say where she lives, so I don’t know which species (or subspecies) might be at play here. If she has a Butler’s, Northwestern or Short-headed Garter Snake, she might do better with earthworms than fish; if she has an Eastern or Western Ribbon Snake, she’d do better with live fish than worms. Common Garter Snakes should eat both.

It’s of interest to me that the snakes aren’t showing any interest in live fish; most species would gleefuly attack and devour any live fish that were offered. But there are always exceptions: individuals and local populations that aren’t interested in what their species normally eats. Or maybe she has a worm-eating species.

Her best bet is to try to locate some earthworms, which most garter snakes will attack with relish; I’ve often thought of earthworms as comfort food for garter snakes. If pet stores don’t have them, she should try a bait shop, making sure to get nightcrawlers rather than red wigglers. I rather suspect that her two snakes will eat if she gives them some worms. (She should be very careful to feed them separately; I’ve had to intervene when two garter snakes attacked the opposite ends of the same worm!)

If they don’t eat earthworms, and they’re not ribbon snakes or some west coast aquatic species of garter snake, then something might be up. What might that something be?

1. They may not have adapted to captivity yet. There’s a rule of thumb among snake breeder that says that once you bring your new snake home, you should leave it alone for three days, without trying to handle it or try to feed it, so that it can get used to its new surroundings. And that’s with captive-bred snakes; wild snakes are going to be even more stressed out by being captured and put into a cage. Liz has only had these snakes for three and a half days, so they may simply have not settled down yet.
2. There may be a problem with the cage. Liz should make sure that there’s a source of water, that they’re warm enough (but not too warm; we’re talking 75-85°F/25-30°C, no more), that there’s enough room (but not too much room; a 25-gallon tank would be the upper limit for two garter snakes), and that there are places for the snakes to hide.
3. They may not be hungry yet. My snakes get fed every week or so, though garter snakes can be opportunistic gluttons that gorge themselves at every opportunity. Even so, this may also be a possibility.
4. They may be too shy. Some of my snakes won’t eat in front of me. I have to leave them alone and wait overnight for them to eat.
5. They may not be garter snakes. Let’s assume that Liz has identified these snakes properly, but not everyone does. I’ve seen green snakes, gopher snakes and rat snakes tagged as garter snakes; it seems that in North America, some people think that every harmless snake is a garter snake. If these aren’t garter snakes, they’ll want something else to eat.

In the end, though, if they continue to refuse to eat, or she can’t provide them with something they will eat, she should probably release them, within a week or two, where she found them, so that they can go and find something they want to eat, and on their own terms.

Two days ago I was wandering around in a bush lot and came across what I believe is an Eastern Ribbon snake (dark grey with light yellow stripes, very long tail and no patterning) taking up some sun on a leaf-covered rock pile. While I was busy admiring this fellow who seemed content to let me do so I didn’t notice that my dog had found another snake a few feet away and was ashamedly harassing it. By the time I got hold of his collar and pulled him off, the poor snake was sort of balled up with mostly belly showing, half covered in the leaves.

I didn’t want to handle the snake and add insult to injury but I did at least want to make sure he was still alive. I gently rolled him over (he was still all balled up, belly up) and he slowly unwound and headed for cover under the leaves.  At first I thought it was another ribbon snake but the belly was a very bright yellow-green color, more like a garter snake.

My question is threefold. Firstly, do you think it was a garter snake or a ribbon snake that suffered at the nose of my dog? Secondly, given how long it took him to right himself do you think he was OK? I’d hate to think my dog caused him any harm. And lastly, the snake did get a chomp in on my dogs nose. I’ve been told that garter snakes can emit a mild toxin when they bite and/or eliminate a musky fluid. Could either of these cause a dog or any other animal to become mildly ill?

My bad boy sort of came down with what I can only equate to mild flu symptoms later that evening. (Yep — serves him right.)

The short answer is that it does not seem likely that either the snake or your dog came to harm as a result of the encounter. I could be wrong, but if your dog got sick later that evening, it’s probably not a result of anything a garter snake did.

But to answer your three questions in turn:

1. Was it a garter snake or a ribbon snake? I’ve already written an article on how to tell the two of them apart, but, in my experience, belly scales aren’t something you can use to tell the two kinds of snake apart. I’ve seen garter snakes whose belly scales are almost black, and others that have belly scales as bright as what you describe — and these were the exact same kind of garter snake!

In the same area, garter snakes and ribbon snakes have the same kind of colouration: the two snakes I used to show the difference between garter snakes and ribbon snakes were only found a few feet apart. Similarly, in Florida, Blue-striped Ribbon Snakes, Thamnophis sauritus nitae, and Blue-striped Garter Snakes, Thamnophis sirtalis similis, are found in the same area. Their local habitat has a big impact on their colouration: it’s why so many snakes in the mangrove swamps of the Everglades are bright orange, and why snakes on the prairies are all in similar shades of browns and greys. In a word, camouflage.

In the end, though, garter snakes and ribbon snakes are closely related enough that it doesn’t matter for the purposes of your other questions.

2. Was the snake okay? I think so: the fact that it crawled away is a positive sign. I’ve encountered snakes in the wild with huge gashes in their sides or who are missing half their tails (unlike lizards, snakes don’t grow their tails back) — snakes that have had run-ins with birds or other large predators and have still managed to survive. If you didn’t see a significant dog-inflicted wound on the snake, my guess is that it will probably live to musk another day.

So what was it doing when it was “sort of balled up with mostly belly showing”? It was playing dead. Biting and excreting musk aren’t the only defenses in a snake’s arsenal: sometimes they curl up to protect their head while offering their tails as a lure; sometimes they flop over and play dead. Eastern Hognose Snakes, Heterodon platirhinos, are the most famous for doing this, and they do it better than any other species of snake; take a look at this short video of a hognose snake playing dead by Benny Mazur:

Garter snakes have also been known to do this (Gibbons and Dorcas 2005, p. 80); it has been quite well documented, for example, in the Plains Garter Snake, Thamnophis radix (Ernst and Ernst 2003, p. 415). My guess is that this, or some other kind of defensive behaviour, is what was going on.

3. Could a snake’s bite or musk cause a dog or other animal to become mildly ill? Only mildly, if that. Garter snake musk is pretty pungent, enough that it could make you gag a bit if you’re a bit sensitive to it. (I’ve been exposed to it since I was eight years old, so I’m pretty blasé about it, but yeah, it’s kind of strong.) But it’s not engineered to be toxic, just foul. Getting zapped by a skunk would almost certainly be worse.

As for a garter snake’s bite, their saliva has been described as slightly venomous, but that’s not normally a cause for concern. Ernst and Ernst (2003) have documented reactions to garter snake bites that they describe as “envenomation”: one boy suffered swelling in the hand and lymph nodes and required hospitalization; Carl Ernst himself has developed a hyperallergic reaction to garter snake saliva (Ernst and Ernst 2003, p. 436).

But it’s important to keep that in perspective: most people who have been bitten by a garter snake have suffered no ill effects whatsoever. My girlfriend gets bitten by garters all the time, and was once bitten by our female Wandering Garter Snake, Thamnophis elegans vagrans, considered one of the more “venomous” garter snakes. I watched — a little too eagerly, she said — to see if any reactions occurred at the bite wound; none did.

The bottom line is probably that some people can have an allergic reaction to the bite of even harmless snakes — and even if their saliva has some toxic properties, garter snakes are still harmless to the vast majority of the population.

Still more perspective: Tennant and Bartlett (2000) report that “animals as small as cats” survive envenomation by copperheads (p. 478), which, even if they have the mildest venom of any North American pit viper, are still several orders of magnitude more dangerous than garter snakes.

I’m not a veterinarian, and I can’t be 100 percent sure, but my guess is that your dog is probably fine — at least as far as his encounter with the snake is concerned.

References

I just recently brought home my garter snake from my father’s house and I’m just not sure about the lighting situation. I read the Heating and Lighting section of your care guide, but was not sure about the lighting and heating at night. I currently have a heating pad underneath the cage and a 60-watt red-glass lightbulb in a 20-gallon long tank. The temperature generally stays in the lower 70s, but at night I’m afraid it may get too cool for him. I read that the snakes generally need certain hours of light and darkness, but does the red light bulb count as light (I’m pretty sure it just may provide heat)? Or should I get two bulbs, one for light and the red bulb, and turn the white light off at night? I just want to give Bubba the best care I can give him. Thanks for your time.

I wrote back:

You don’t have to be super-precise with temperatures: garter snakes are pretty robust; they can usually handle cooler temperatures than, say, boa constrictors; and it’s okay if it cools off a bit at night. They don’t need, in other words, to be at 80°F at all hours of the day.

Unless your house gets well into the 60s overnight, an incandescent light bulb during the day is probably enough. If it does get cooler than that, then add a heating pad. I wouldn’t worry about the red bulb. I’d only worry about a red bulb overnight if I was keeping tropical or heat-loving reptiles (lizards, mostly) and the house was drafty in winter and/or air conditioned in the summer.

My home isn’t air conditioned and is plenty warm during the summer without any additional heating; during the winter, which has been profoundly cold (as in below -30) here this winter, cages outside the heated snake room are on heating pads 24/7, and some of them have overhead lights.

Hope that helps. I’m probably overdue in updating the care section.

Debbie wrote on a cold day in January:

My parents live in a rural area around Neepawa, Manitoba. It’s one of the coldest days in January here, -49 with the windchill. My mom has found a very small green and yellow garter snake alive on her kitchen floor in the early evening. How did it get into the house and how do we get rid of it? Also, is there a chance this is only a baby and there is a larger snake somewhere with more babies? She also has a small dog and three kittens. Any advice will be appreciated.

I wrote back:

You’re probably dealing with a baby snake that couldn’t find anywhere else to hibernate; it probably got in through a crack in the foundation or something. Baby garter snakes don’t stay with their mothers; they scatter after birth. In fact, baby snakes tend to hibernate in different spots than adults do, at least in Manitoba. So it’s not a given that there’s a whole “nest” of snakes waiting for your parents, unless a bunch of other snakes independently decided that their house was the only place they could find to hibernate.

Getting rid of it is going to be a problem in January, as I indicated in my article. Put it outside, and you’ll kill it. But keeping it may not be any easier, either. You mention the dog and kittens: I should point out that cats and dogs are more of a danger to snakes than the other way around (my two cats would kill any snake of mine that got out, and some of my snakes are quite large).

If it were me, I’d find some way of keeping it over winter and then release it in the spring. But you’re not me.

Next, Heather wrote last night about a baby snake that didn’t make it:

I’m in South Dakota, Sioux Falls to be exact. Yesterday we found a baby garter snake in the basement … very slow, cold and damaged on the tail from one of the cats. Once I warmed him up he was OK, and active. I cleaned out an old plexiglass 5 gallon aquarium, put in a dry washrag and a bowel of water. Today I went to Petco and got a heat pad, and bedding and a few crickets. Set him up and gave him crickets. Two hours later, I find him dead. He’s limp, unresponsive, but still “loose” not stiff. Pretty sure he’s dead since he’s so limp. I am really upset … what did I do wrong?

My response:

Apart from the fact that garter snakes don’t eat crickets, which wouldn’t have made any difference in the short time frame you had him, I can’t see anything obvious you did wrong that would lead to him dying.

The problem with snakes is that quite often they give you no warning that anything is seriously wrong with them until they very suddenly drop dead. (And yes: dead snakes are quite limp.) I know how upsetting it can be to have to face, and how confusing it can be when it really comes out of nowhere.

In this case, I can only make some guesses: the damage may have been more severe than it looked, or the snake may not have had a good hibernation and was on the verge of starvation — already too far gone — when you found him. We’ll never know.

Previously: Garter Snakes Absorb Newt Toxins as a Defence Against Birds; Newts, Garter Snakes Engaged in Toxic Arms Race at Molecular Level.

From this I can only guess that most of my page views are generated by people searching for information about garter snakes, and that most of them do so when garter snakes are out and about in the wild. This suggests that I should provide more information for people who find garter snakes in their gardens, and not just for people who keep them in cages.

The Serpent’s Spell by Rae Bridgman is a fantasy novel: two young sorcerers must solve the mystery of who is responsible for the deaths of snakes at the Narcisse snake dens; ages 9-12 and up. I’ve got a copy on order and should have more to say about this book shortly.

Vernon and the Snake by Crystal J. Stranaghan is aimed at ages 4-9. “[Vernon] just wants to play, but comes across a garter snake in his backyard. He suits up, ready to do battle — but there’s another side of the story,” the the Parksville Qualicum News reports. “Stranaghan provides two points of view: Vernon’s and the snake’s. One just has to flip over the book to see what the snake thinks of Vernon. Eventually, the two find a way to live peacefully together by learning about each other — a valuable lesson which can be applied elsewhere.”

Buy The Serpent’s Spell and Vernon and the Snake at Amazon.com.

Update: It may not be this simple: the Canadian Press report suggests that, with Halifax being a port city, it’s possible that it might be an exotic species and something more dangerous, rather than someone taking the vapours because a garter snake bit them. But you know how subjective and unreliable snake sighting reports can be.