I've started stuffing Scotch-Brite stainless steel scrubbing pads into the weep holes (at the foundation line) around the outside of my house. I've got about a 4 1/2 foot racer that likes to hang around the flower beds and shrubs. Yesterday when he went behind the shrubs I noticed he went into one of those slots. I thought it was too small for him, but it didn't faze him. I don't know where he can go from there, but I don't want to meet him in the attic, or the interior of the house.

My wife has issued a fatwa on him if she sees him; and her opinion is that he's going to die. I just want him out of my space, and I'll stay out of his. I must be becoming a bunny-hugger. I've killed hundreds of snakes, but I'm not as mad at them as I used to be. If they're poisonous, that's a different situation. I relocate them to the garbage with their head missing.

I just found a 6" X 1/4" baby snake in the driveway. I had in my mind that snakes gave birth in the spring. Apparently that is not the case? Do they give birth prior to going dormant?

What does a racer look like? My wife found a 4 foot something or other behind her little cabin at the farm but it slithered under the place before I could get there. It was supposedly green and black with horizontal, not vertical, stripes. I looked it up and a garter snake was as close as I could find on the net. But a buddy told me garters don't get that long.

I'm sure it wasn't a moccasin. But we did almost step on one of those recently on the trail. And all concerned were lucky. It moved just before I set foot on it. And it was lucky too. Only time lately when I've been there and didn't have a gun of some type...it did the whole noise making thing from both ends.

Personally I won't kill a non poisonous snake. But the wife is not so broad minded...

The one that has adopted me is gray, slender, and smooth-skinned, and fast.

Besides a racer, I think they refer to them as a coachwhip, or whip snake. He looks a little like this Graham's Crayfish Snake, but he doesn't have the light colored bottom half.

http://www.texassnakes.net/crayfish.htm

We occasionally have some variety of non-venomous snakes under our farm house (rat, king, chicken, I don't know which for sure). I like having them there cause we also get mice & rats. Some are pretty big, 5 ft.

I have lived in Texas all my life and still see snakes types that look new to me. My dog stepped on a rather nasty red snake and the dog never saw it. I ran a snake off my parking lot that could not get traction on the smooth serface. The head was wide and body skinny. The snakes keep other things in check and the hawks and roadrunners eat most every thing. So don't kill much any more.