2022 caught 20 , 2023 #22 - #27 just caught about 18inches

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Oh my gosh! At this point, you could just catch them and put little orange fin outfits on them. Pretend they are long, skinny, bad-tempered goldfish.
Sorry you keep having these visitors. Being accepting of nature is great but geez... these snakes need to find another place to eat.
 
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you could take a elastic band that we use on spear fishing guns and make a spear but one that has a blunt tip that's like 2 inches round that could never puncture a liner and shot the dang thing. obviously there's no shortage of snakes around there
 

YShahar

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Oy, not another one!? Are they being born in your pond or coming in from somewhere else?

I hope you manage to trap this latest one before it eats any of your new fish.
 

cas

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Oh crap. The thing actually was waiting for you to restock the pond. Fingers crossed you get it quickly.
 

addy1

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I think we had one big fat female show up last year, it was our first snake , ie water snake , ever. I sort of watched it, was sort of fun, then started seeing more. I think she dropped babies and that is what we are fighting this year.

We had another big fat female, caught a picture of her mating, she was trapped a few days later, relocated along with her man. But since then we have one after another show up. Have trapped 3 at a time, same trap.

Mating female this year.
20220518_103825(1).jpg
 

addy1

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Oh crap. The thing actually was waiting for you to restock the pond. Fingers crossed you get it quickly.
Two traps out, waiting to see if it gets caught. One has a small goldfish that swam in. Right now a sacrifice, but rather lose one then the numbers I have been losing.

The hatchery is shut next weekend for the winter.
 

addy1

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Oy, not another one!? Are they being born in your pond or coming in from somewhere else?

I hope you manage to trap this latest one before it eats any of your new fish.
I think they have been born here, in 11 years of ponding this is the first time ever we have had a water snake issue. There is a river near us, but quite a long snake wiggle away, like a few miles.
We must have had one wiggle here and it was the female which dropped the kids. They can lay up to 30 babies. Average 6-8.
 
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I think they have been born here, in 11 years of ponding this is the first time ever we have had a water snake issue. There is a river near us, but quite a long snake wiggle away, like a few miles.
We must have had one wiggle here and it was the female which dropped the kids. They can lay up to 30 babies. Average 6-8.
Wow Addy1....Could it be due to the excessive heat this year? Maybe a lot of habitat has dried up forcing them to find other ponds? Glad I only have one...hope its a male:)
 

addy1

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Doesn't it take a while for a snake to get that big?
According to what I have read, mature in 2 years. There is a chance we had some which I never saw, then ended up with so many saw them all of the time.

More than you ever wanted to know about water snakes:


Baby water snakes are born in June, July, or August. The mother gives birth to five to 60 young, sometimes over a period of several days. One female was observed to give birth to 99 babies. The young are 7 to 10 inches long.
They grow to be 24 to 42 inches. Females are generally bigger than males.

They give birth to live young (viviparous) after a 58-day gestation period. This snake is mature at 2 to 3 years of age.

These snakes eat frogs, turtles, fish, and other small animals found in their habitat. Sometimes they will round up fish or tadpoles with their long bodies and them eat them, or simply swim through a school of fish with their mouths open. Northern water snakes may also eat dead fish.

The young snakes will grow quite quickly for the first couple of years, doubling in size by the time they are two years old, when they become sexually mature. From the third year onwards the Northern Water Snake will continue to grow, but at a much slower pace. As they get older, they will also become darker in color. Snakes that have been kept in captivity have been known to live up to ten years, but there is very little evidence about the life span of the Northern Water Snake in the wild.

Northern Water Snake is one of the larger species of snakes in the United States

A sedentary species, the watersnake’s home range is the size of the wetland it inhabits, or less than a 400-foot stretch of a river or stream.
 

addy1

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Wow Addy1....Could it be due to the excessive heat this year? Maybe a lot of habitat has dried up forcing them to find other ponds? Glad I only have one...hope its a male:)
I don't know, we had a wet spring, now dry and hot. Last year about the same. If they were around the year before I never saw any and we watch the ponds all of the time via the cams. My first spotting was big fatty she was sunning on the side of the pond, last year.
This year it has been non stop. If I had this many last year, the year before I would have seen them. Last year we caught 4.

The fish aren't making enough babies to keep up with the depletion.
 

addy1

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Waaal, it's got a bunch of bog-fed goldfish in a pond, so ...
With everything I have read they grow fast first two years, then slow down and keep growing. I did see one 10 inch snake this year in the bog, never saw it again. The size I caught ranged from 18 inches to 2-3 feet, they don't hold still for a good measure.

I was surprised to read they don't travel much, ie stick to their area.

Who knows
 

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