Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
After rainy summer, snakes are popping up in residential areas
Everyone thought the snakes would be gone by now.
But they are lingering, months after a summer deluge pushed them out of their hiding spots and into people’s yards. Although they usually stay hidden, that’s not the case in some South Florida neighborhoods.
And it’s not just your garden-variety snake that is showing up.
The venomous cottonmouth has been such a problem in one Pembroke Pines community that many families canceled their Halloween trick-or-treating.
Richard DeLauter estimates he has killed approximately 100 cottonmouths in the last two years in Cobblestone, his community just west of Interstate 75. The development is bordered by 1.6 acres of wetlands on its east side and a canal and pond on the west.
When DeLauter and his wife go for evening walks, he carries an axe handle to hit the snakes over the head.
“I haven’t seen the situation
get any better, whether it is the dry season or rainy. Sometimes there’s a lull, but they always come back,” he said.
While snakes are common throughout South Florida, frequent sightings of venomous snakes are rare, said Coleman Sheehy, with the Florida Museum of Natural History’s Division of Herpetology.
Florida has 44 native varieties of snakes, only six of them venomous, and most sightings are of the non-venomous kind, Sheehy said.
“There are at least one to three varieties of water snakes that live in the same habitat and look very similar [to venomous snakes] and are easily and often confused,” he said.
Cottonmouths are common to wetlands, streams, lakes and roadside ditches. When they go into neighborhoods, they may simply be going to forage in places their species have ventured to for millions of years, Sheehy said.
And sometimes snakes go onto roads to warm their bodies, he said.
In Miramar, the Silver Isles community was recently inundated by cottonmouths after summer rains pushed them to higher ground, closer to homes. But the number of sightings there appears to have waned as the water levels in canals and lakes returned to normal.
Laura Vera, property manager for Cobblestone’s homeowner’s association, called the snake issue significant.
“We have 1.6 miles of wetland just to the east of us,” Vera said. “We lay snake repellent in the common areas, around playgrounds and the clubhouse and we have contacted pest control companies.”
She also said the association put down 100 rat traps throughout the complex to eliminate that food source.
Vera said the community can’t apply repellent or put up any sort of barrier along the wetlands because it’s a protected area. She said the development’s legal staff has reached out to county officials to find out what can be done to prevent the snakes from venturing into the community.
She said that when the Department of Transportation erected a noise wall on the west side of I-75 about three years ago, the snake problem got “exponentially worse.”
Cobblestone resident Amanda Spurling said she suggested trick-or-treating be suspended out of concern for children’s safety.
“Given that a venomous snake could be anywhere, with so many children out, it made sense not to have them walking all around the complex at night,” she said.
While there were some trick-or-treaters, the crowd was much smaller than in previous years, she said.
Vera said residents knew when they bought their property that wildlife, including snakes, might be present. It’s included in the contract disclosure, she said.