How to Tag Snakes

Seeing multiple snakes in your backyard can often be a telltale sign that your back yard is snake territory. Tagging snakes is a useful tool to help you understand snake habits and identify breeding/living grounds by capturing snakes, marking them and releasing and recapturing them to identify their territorial grounds. For a more practical use, however, tagging snakes can help you as a homeowner understand if your backyard is snake territory, and if so, provide a warning signal to expect a mass of snakes come their breeding season in spring.

Things You'll Need

  • Heavy-duty gardening gloves
  • Cloth bag
  • Nonpermanent marker
  • White spray paint
Show More

Instructions

    • 1
      Identify your quadrant zone.

      Identify your "quadrant zone" -- the area where you will collect and observe your snake population. To do this, spray the white spray paint around the perimeter of the area where you want to study your snake population. By doing this, you will avoid selective bias where you will prefer hunting in more snake-friendly areas (taller grass, more shade and boulders) when re-collecting your snakes and hence go outside of your quadrant zone.

    • 2
      Safety first when searching for snakes.

      Put on heavy-duty gardening gloves and search for the nonpoisonous snake species which you would like to mark within your quadrant zone. Look in shady areas and areas which have vegetation, as snakes will most likely be found there due to reptiles being cold blooded. Ensure that when hunting for snakes you wear heavy-duty rain boots that come up to your knee, and always be aware of your surroundings to ensure you do not startle any poisonous snakes that you will have identified as living in your area. When you do find your target nonpoisonous snake, grab it by the head and place it in your cloth sack. With each snake, note its capture point as you will have to return it to the same area after you have marked it. Record the number of snakes and the location where you found them.

    • 3

      Remove each snake from your cloth sack and place an X with your nonpermanent marker on the snake's tail while holding down on the snake's head. Using a nonpermanent marker ensures that the X will wash off after a few weeks, so that when you put the snake back into its environment, it will be in its natural form.

    • 4

      Release each snake back where you found it in Step 2.

    • 5

      Repeat Step 2 after four days. Remain in your quadrant zone and capture the same number of snakes you originally caught in Step 2. After recording how many caught snakes have your mark on their tails, release the snakes back where you caught them.

    • 6

      Repeat Step 2 at least three times (more if you want even more accurate data) and calculate your recapture rate by dividing the number of marked snakes by the total number of snakes. If your recapture rate is above 60 percent, your quadrant zone is a territory for most of your originally marked snakes.