A shed skin in the crawl space
Papery, translucent and often caught on a pier or a duct strap. It says a snake has been living under there long enough to grow, which is different from one that wandered in during a storm and left.
A symptom, not the cause
Snakes Around Conway Homes and Crawl Spaces
Most active from spring through autumn, with sightings spiking after heavy rain and on warm evenings
The gist
A snake in a crawl space is a rodent report with legs missing. Snakes go where the food is, and under a house the food is rats and mice, so the useful question is not how to repel the snake but what it came in after. SCDNR counts 38 snake species in South Carolina and six of them are venomous. The rest are harmless and doing you a favor.
What to look for
How to tell
These signs usually show up before the pest itself does.
Rodent droppings in the same space
This is the finding that matters. Snake plus rodent evidence in one visit means the snake is a consequence, and treating only the snake leaves the reason it came sitting under your floor.
Daylight under the crawl space door
If you can see light along the bottom edge, that is a doorway. The same applies to a garage door with a flattened seal and to a threshold that has lost its sweep, and those three account for most indoor sightings.
One in the garage after heavy rain
A downpour floods the ditch lines and the low ground, and everything that lives there moves up. A single sighting in the day or two after a band of storms is usually weather rather than an established resident.
Why you have them and the house next door might not
Horry County is snake country for the simplest reason there is, which is that it is prey country. Ditch banks, tidal creek edges, the swamp margins along the Waccamaw and the pine and scrub between subdivisions hold frogs, lizards, rodents and insects in numbers, and 38 species work through that living. The ones that end up against a house are following food that already moved in: rats along a ditch line, mice in a shed, a rodent run under a crawl space floor.
Then local building lets them in without much effort. A vented crawl space is an open room with a torn screen somewhere in it, gaps around every pipe and duct penetration, and usually a gap under the access door. Above ground the routes are a garage door with a flattened bottom seal, a threshold with no sweep, deep pine straw beds and dense ivy running right up to the siding, and firewood stacked against a wall. Heavy rain then pushes everything, snakes and rodents alike, onto higher ground.
Snakes follow the same drainage lines whether the address is in Conway or well outside it, and homes near Longs back up to surrounding woodland along the SC-9/SC-905 corridor where brush piles and ditch banks give cover right up to a foundation. Farther out toward Aynor, hedgerows between the house and surrounding farmland do the same job pine straw does in town. The licensed pros we connect you with check both the same way.
Snake sightings around Conway crawl spaces often trace back to woodpiles, brick veneer gaps, and vent screens left loose after a repair. The same holds true toward Finklea and along the US-701 corridor, where rural drainage ditches and field edges push snakes toward the nearest foundation when water rises. Closer in, Red Hill's newer subdivisions along US-501 still back up to open lots, so a tidy yard is no guarantee. The licensed pros we connect you with check crawl space vents and door thresholds first on any call like this.
Calls for it come in from all over Horry County, Myrtle Beach, Carolina Forest and Socastee among them.
At a glance
- The numbers
- SCDNR puts the state total at 38 species, only six of which are venomous
- The venomous six
- Copperhead, cottonmouth, eastern diamondback rattlesnake, canebrake or timber rattlesnake, pigmy rattlesnake, eastern coral snake
- Ways in
- A gap under a garage or crawl space door, a torn vent screen, an open pipe or duct penetration, a missing weep hole cover
- When
- Most active from spring through autumn, with sightings spiking after heavy rain and on warm evenings
- Guide price
- an estimated $189–$549
Make sure it is not this instead
Copperheads and the harmless snakes blamed for being one. Almost every panicked identification around here is a copperhead call, and most of them are wrong. A copperhead carries dark crossbands shaped like an hourglass, wide down the flanks and pinched narrow where they cross the spine, on a copper to tan ground, with an unmarked coppery head. A banded water snake, the one usually mistaken for it near a pond, has bands that are widest along the top and narrow down the sides, which is the pattern reversed. A corn snake has blotches with black borders rather than crossbands, plus a checkerboard belly. Young ratsnakes are gray with dark blotches and no copper anywhere. Separately, the coral snake is the state's rarest venomous species and gets confused with the harmless scarlet kingsnake, so a small red, black and yellow snake is a photograph from a distance rather than a hands on identification.
What a professional job looks like
The visit has two halves and the second one is the point of it. First the animal in front of you: identified from a safe distance, then removed with hooks and a tube or a bag rather than by hand, and never with a shovel, since most bites in this state happen to people who decided to deal with it themselves. Then the actual work, which is finding out why a predator judged your crawl space worth hunting. That means a rodent inspection under the floor and around the perimeter, looking for droppings, rub marks, gnawed duct, runs through the insulation and openings at the pipe penetrations, plus a walk of the yard for the harborage that supports it.
What follows is rodent control and carpentry in that order. Rodent pressure is dealt with properly rather than with a couple of bait stations, then the building gets closed: crawl space vents rescreened in galvanized mesh, the access door refitted so no light shows under it, pipe and duct penetrations sealed, weep holes screened, a new bottom seal on the garage door and a sweep on the threshold. Outside, pine straw and mulch get pulled back to a bare strip against the foundation, ivy comes off the wall, ground cover is thinned, firewood goes up on a rack away from the house, and anything holding water gets emptied. It is worth being straight about the powders and granules sold as snake repellent: there is no good evidence they keep a snake out of a crawl space, and money spent on them is money not spent on the screen and the rodents.
Nobody needs a schedule for a snakes problem with an obvious start and an obvious end. Anyone who says otherwise is working from a sales sheet.
| Your case | What we would advise |
|---|---|
| Something contained, in one part of the property | Treat it once |
| Pressure off the yard or the marsh, year after year | Recurring visits |
| Something living in the crawl space, a void or the attic | Treatment with exclusion work |
Timing is not optional
Identification carries a legal weight here that surprises people. Under SCDNR's reptile and amphibian regulations, native reptiles may not be sold, purchased, traded, exchanged, bartered, gifted, shipped, transferred or re-homed, and at least one native snake, the southern hognose, cannot lawfully be taken or possessed at all without a departmental permit issued for research or education. Which means a snake removed from your crawl space is not something to pass to a neighbor with a tank, and a harmless species killed on sight because somebody assumed it was a copperhead may not have been a lawful animal to take. The practical instruction is short: photograph it, do not touch it, and let somebody who can name it decide what happens next.
The mess is the second job
This is the one entry on the page where the animal itself damages nothing, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A snake does not chew, dig, tear insulation or foul a vapor barrier the way the mammals here do. What it leaves is a shed skin, occasionally a small amount of waste, and a very bad afternoon for whoever found it. The real cost sits with the reason it was there. Rodents under a floor shred insulation, gnaw duct and wiring, contaminate the vapor barrier and keep breeding, and that is the invoice, along with the screening, sealing and door work that closes the space for good. There is one exception worth naming: a snake that dies inside a wall cavity or under a floor after somebody sealed an opening produces an odor and a fly problem that has to be traced and cut out, which is a fair argument for finding the animal rather than trapping it in.
What is genuinely worth doing yourself
The habitat half is all yours and it is the half that lasts. Cut the grass, thin dense ground cover, take ivy off the foundation, keep pine straw and mulch shallow and back from the siding, stack firewood off the ground and away from the wall, clear scrap timber and old pots, and keep birdseed in a sealed bin rather than an open bag in the shed, because spilled seed is a rodent feeder and rodents are what you are really managing. Fitting a door sweep and a garage door seal is a Saturday job. What not to do is handle or corner a snake you cannot identify with certainty, kill it with a garden tool at arm's length, or reach into a woodpile or under a step without looking first.
What it means for your household
Most snakes here are non venomous and are actively useful, since a ratsnake in a barn is doing the job you would otherwise be paying for. Six species in South Carolina are venomous, and in this part of the coastal plain the copperhead is the one most often encountered around houses, with the cottonmouth close to water. If somebody is bitten, the approach is simple and the old remedies are all wrong. Call 911 or get to an emergency department straight away, because the treatment is antivenom and it is not something a house call fixes. Keep the person still and calm, get them away from the snake so it cannot bite again, take off rings, watches and anything tight near the bite before swelling starts, and keep the limb roughly level with the heart. Do not cut the wound, do not try to suck venom out, do not apply ice and do not use a tourniquet or a tight pressure bandage, since all of those cause harm and delay proper care. Photograph the snake from a distance if you can do it safely, and do not go looking for it. A bitten dog goes straight to a vet.
Roughly what it runs
A snakes job around here tends to sit between an estimated $189 and $549. Which end depends on the house rather than on the insect. Nobody charges you for the looking, and the figure is written down before a technician starts. Every band, and what pushes it up, sits on the pricing guide, and the service covering it is Wildlife Removal.
Also on this site
Others we get called about
Birds in Vents and Ducts
The blocked duct is the real issue. The noise is what people call about.
Opossums
Passing through more often than moving in. Opossums are the animal people most often mistake for a serious problem.
Moles
Blamed for two things it did not do. Moles are not eating your plants.
Questions & Answers
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I tell if it is venomous?
From a photograph and a distance, not from a rhyme. The pupil shape and head shape rules people quote require you to be closer than you should be. Pattern is more useful: copperhead crossbands are hourglass shaped, wide on the flanks and pinched at the spine, on a copper ground with a plain coppery head, and the water snake that gets mistaken for it has that pattern the other way round. If you are not confident, take a photo from several feet away, keep pets and children inside, and send it to somebody who identifies snakes for a living. Assume nothing and touch nothing in the meantime.
Where are they getting into the crawl space?
Nearly always through something already broken. A torn or missing vent screen, a gap under the access door, an unsealed opening where a pipe or duct passes through the block, an uncapped weep hole, or the corner of a skirting panel that has come loose. None of it needs to be large. The reason a proper visit maps all of them rather than just the one nearest the sighting is that closing a single hole leaves a snake following the same rodent trail to the next one.
Do the repellent granules work?
There is no good evidence that they do, and plenty of people here have a bag of the stuff in the shed and a snake under the house. The products are inexpensive and the disappointment is predictable. What actually reduces sightings is far less satisfying to buy: fewer rodents, cut grass, thinner ground cover, mulch back from the wall, firewood off the ground and every opening under the house screened in metal. That combination changes whether a snake has a reason to be there, which no powder does.
Should I just kill it?
It is a poor idea on three counts. Most snakes in this county are harmless and eat rodents, so you would be removing free pest control. Trying to kill one with a tool is how a large share of bites happen, because it puts your hands and feet inside striking range of an animal that would otherwise have left. And South Carolina protects some native snakes specifically, so a wrong identification can also be an unlawful take. Back away, photograph it, and let it move on or have it removed.
Will you take it away or just move it outside?
That depends on the species and on state regulations, which is a real constraint rather than a dodge. Native reptiles cannot be traded, gifted or re-homed under SCDNR rules, and one species cannot lawfully be possessed without a permit, so a competent operator identifies the animal first and then works within what is permitted, and will tell you what that means for your situation. What should not vary is the rest of the visit, because moving an animal off the property without dealing with the rodents and the openings just books you a repeat visit.
Get Started Today
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