Old Tires, snakes and critters

Any of you who have a few tires in a stack or a pile, have you ever seen snakes among them?

The reason I ask, I ended up with several old tires, and they have come in handy, especially for making a level surface on a hillside. If I stack 3 or 4 and slide tires 2,3 and 4 off a bit of center, the top one becomes level for a large water container or table top. I use them to hold big gates in place during windstorms, and they are easy to lift and move.

So while they aren't my favorite substance, at least they are helping me and they won't go into a landfill while I'm around. And I have never seen anything on them or make a nest in them, not mice or rats or lizards or hornets, nothing. Which probably speaks to how awful they are, but I was thinking that a way to keep snakes out of a wood pile would be to use the tires to hold the pile up off the ground, and support the wood, and when a snake approaches it, he keeps running into a tire, so maybe they won't hang around it.

anyone have experience with this?

 

tires around here are recycled or collected as much as possible because of the mosquito breeding that happens in them when left exposed to the rains.

i think tires would get too hot for them if left exposed to the sun, but if covered by wood i think they'd be habitat. if you want to use them as a base you could put them down and then fill them with sand and see what happens.

 

I just went and checked 4 tires with water in them, no mosquito larvae, yet there's plenty of larvae in every other possible container of water. that hasn't been dumped over. I've tried in the past to get water out of tires, and it just won't empty, yet there's never been anything in it. That is what has always surprised me, because tires make such safe places for critters, yet nothing gets into them. Unless you guys have different kinds of mosquitoes than we do.

Now that I think of it, even where I use them in a pile, I've never found a snake skin or snake poop around the tires.

 

I tried growing potatoes in a stack of tires once. The plants seemed to be doing really well but when I went to harvest them there were hardly any potatoes. I don't know if I did something wrong or if there was something in or on the tires that affected their development but I decided not to eat them and composted them instead.

 

i dunno, but it could be that they are too hot, or smell funny, but around here all tires with water will tend to have larvae in them as will any other container of water left undrained. we have a lot of odd decorations scattered about that Ma has put up and moved around as it suits her, i don't always find and empty all of them after the rains. i rinse out and refill the birdbaths every day or so (depending upon how much it rains and how much of a mess the birds are making) and that keeps the mosquitoes from growing in those. tonight was the first time the mosquito control has been by with their poison spray. earlier in the spring they fly planes over the local river flood plains and wetlands and drop granules on the water to poison the larvae.

i'm not sure if you are wanting to encourage snakes or not, but for us rocks and rock piles seem to work very well. we have resident snakes all over the place here i just wish they were big enough to eat some of the larger varmints we have running around. buggers are eating my crocuses again...