Getting rattlesnake prevention done in the winter means it will be cheaper, better, completed faster and more smoothly, with the best customer service possible.

Cooler temperatures are here and rattlesnake activity is slow. Plans for your backyard that may have included preventative actions to keep rattlesnakes out of your yard are giving way for other stuff – holiday decorations or new patio furniture to enjoy Arizona’s perfect cooler season.

But don’t get too distracted – there are several reasons why the cooler months are actually the best time to take care of rattlesnake prevention. If keeping rattlesnakes out of your life is on your long term to-do list, you’ll want to read this to the end.

1. Pricing is as good as it gets – take advantage of winter discounts!

Like any business working with seasonal demand, the need for snake fence installation ebbs and flows alongside rattlesnake activity. If you know right now that keeping rattlesnakes away from your back patio is something you want to do, take advantage of this fact.

Snake fence installation companies almost always offer off-season discounts to help keep the schedule filled, and employees happy. If you wait, as most people do, until rattlesnake activity is at its peak in April – you can expect to pay full price and have less haggle room on the details. It’s classic supply and demand, and when you come in hot looking for snake fencing in December, it’s a buyer’s market.

2. Almost no waiting – Winter has the shortest wait times to have snake fencing installed, and faster completion.

Just like pricing, the winter buyer’s market means that you’ll almost certainly be waiting a lot less time to have your snake fence installed. During peak season (April or so), snake fence providers are absolutely flooded with calls. That means that they’re usually booked out to capacity, sometimes weeks in advance.

Odds are that you’re like most people, and are looking for snake prevention services because of something that happened – a scare with a rattlesnake in the yard, or an incident with a pet – and you need it done right now just to feel at ease in your own yard.

Unfortunately, if you’re waiting for such an event before taking action, you’re in the same boat with everyone else, and may have to wait in line. You can beat the rush by taking advantage of the natural winter slowdown. In most cases, if you shop for snake fence installation in the dead of winter, you can have it installed as early as the next day.

Even better – without the brutal conditions of an Arizona summer, the installers can work longer hours. That means your snake fence will not only be completed sooner during the winter months, but the actual installation time itself will be shorter.

3. Being proactive about something as important as rattlesnake prevention can make a huge difference for the safety of your family and pets

Most people tend to wait until there’s an incident before finally biting the bullet and taking action. That incident is often just seeing a rattlesnake, but more unfortunate situations are also common.

As rattlesnake fence installers ourselves, we have a front-row seat to some very scary and sad encounters that have prompted action. Too often, we are called because a dog has been bitten by a rattlesnake, or in some cases, a family member.

Just like any other type of preventative action, rattlesnake fencing installed proactively can prevent the incident that would otherwise invoke action. If snake fencing is something you know you want to do at some point, don’t wait until an accident happens to get it done.

If you live where rattlesnakes do, proper and professionally installed snake fencing is your best insurance policy, and you can save yourself a lot of stress by getting it done early. While everyone else is panicking on Facebook over a snake seen in the neighborhood, you’ll rest easy knowing you’ve already taken care of it.

If you saw a rattlesnake at your place this year, you have the best opportunity to stop a repeat of that encounter right now.

4. There is a much lower chance of a snake being trapped in the yard

Rattlesnake fencing works both ways – when rattlesnake fencing is installed initially, there’s always some chance that you already have a rattlesnake in your yard, which would now become trapped. Obviously, you’d want to avoid this.

During the cooler months, from late October through late March, rattlesnake activity away from the den is at its lowest levels. More or less, rattlesnakes aren’t traveling very much.

Even then, the occasional rattlesnake den does happen! With milder temperatures and, frankly, more time on our hands, the installers should be able to do a much more thorough search of the property than they may otherwise be able to. Since you’ll want to work with a company that cross-trains snake fence installers in advanced snake detection and removal methods, they’ll be able to make sure your yard is truly snake-free.

5. The best customer service of the year is in the cooler months

This one is just about time! You should see our rattlesnake prevention team in April – driving from house to house as fast as they safely can and making phone calls in between, trying to keep up with the flood. It’s an exciting time and we all love it, but sometimes we just don’t get to spend as much time as we’d really want to with each property.

During the slower winter months, a rattlesnake prevention specialist simply has more time to be available. As a result, you may have a more relaxed and attentive experience. It’s certainly not that someone who calls in April is any less important, but the odds greatly increase that it could go to voicemail than be answered on the first ring.

By having your rattlesnake prevention done during the winter, you’ll be one of a handful of clients at the time and will likely get even more attention from the staff. Not only that, but you’ll probably have more time to ask a lot of questions that have less to do with snake fencing and prevention, and more to do with increasing your general knowledge on the subject. As with most things, the more you know about how rattlesnakes may be interacting with your property, the better prepared you’ll be and the better you’ll feel about living in your home.

6. Rattlesnakes are never truly “gone” in Arizona.

As I mentioned earlier, when it cools down, rattlesnake activity is at its lowest point. For the most part, they are settled into cover in small groups, and sometimes alone. However, this does not mean that you can’t still get a rattlesnake in the yard. Especially if you live at the edge of the desert, it’s possible to have an encounter any day of the year.

In areas of urban conflict, we’re unfortunately not exactly on nature’s schedule for activity. Every time ground is broken on a new development, rattlesnakes there are displaced – sometimes into adjacent neighborhoods. Despite being slower, our rattlesnake relocation hotline is active and receives calls for service throughout the winter.

Most of these winter rattlesnakes are due to construction, but even smaller projects can do the same. If the neighbor a few houses down tears down the old shed, any rattlesnakes using it need to find new cover in a hurry. If the HOA decides to clear brush along the shared viewfence wall, you can expect the same. Regardless of the natural behavior of rattlesnakes, human-caused variables keep our rattlesnake relocation team active all year. There is truly no time where getting a snake fence is a frivolous effort.

The most important reason – the people you care about.

This article has some no-brainer reasons why it’s better to take care of rattlesnake prevention during the slow months. However, the biggest factor has nothing to do with cost or convenience.

The holidays and early new-year are when we most often host visitors. This is when we all get together (in a normal year, that is) to celebrate whatever needs to be celebrated, and guilt one another into eating way too much pie. It’s when we have our first backyard grill party, and invite co-workers over to watch the superbowl.

In Arizona, the cool months are the time when you’re most likely to have the people you care about in your backyard, and you will want to know they are safe. Above all else, thinking ahead and getting out in front of prime rattlesnake season will be the best thing you can do to keep yourself, your family, and your pets safe.

One of the top questions we get about rattlesnake fencing, is HOW HIGH DOES SNAKE FENCING NEED TO BE?

These questions aren’t only from homeowners, but also in regards to regulations from homeowners associations and planned communities who unfortunately often enforce sub-sufficient standards for snake fence installations.

The quick answer: 3’ high. In this post I’m going to show how we got to that answer, and why it’s so important to do it right, that if it’s done wrong, you probably shouldn’t install snake fencing at all.

If you prefer, here’s the video showing how high a snake fence needs to be, including details of our experiments:

A quick recap on this topic: rattlesnake fencing is a physical barrier that is designed and installed in such a way that it prevents rattlesnakes from getting into an area. The exact specifications of how to do this effectively are what our group has developed over the past decade to create the standard this type of work. 

That being said, rattlesnakes are thinking, and unpredictable animals, so these standards need to be based on their behavior and their physical capabilities more than anything else.

And a quick disclaimer: this design is intended to exclude rattlesnake species native to the desert southwest, and while it has a level of varying effectiveness on other types of snakes, there is nothing that will exclude all types of snakes in all places all of the time. If someone promises you that, throw that contact in the trash.

So, back on topic: how high does a snake fence need to be. The question really is: how far up a smooth surface from the nearest foothold can a rattlesnake climb?

Rattlesnakes can and do climb many things: trees, bushes, piles of rocks, anything with sufficient texture and grip opportunity can be used to climb. However, smooth surfaces without protrusions are not climbable by rattlesnakes. Concrete or metal walls are impassable to rattlesnakes as long as they’re high enough to keep them from getting their head over the top. That’s why smooth steel mesh of the right gap size is the perfect material to use when installed at the right height.

From testing and observations, we notice a couple of things about how rattlesnakes attempt to climb smooth surfaces:

First, the structure of their body prohibits them from climbing straight up more than about 1/3 of their body length, unless additional support is offered.

Second, if there is stabilizing support, like a tight corner or a rock to push against, they can climb higher, to about half of their body length.

That means that we need a fence that is as long as half of the body length of the largest rattlesnake in any given area, with some additional buffer to eliminate any variability in height or extraordinarily rare and large individuals.

That means to exclude a 4’ rattlesnake, which is a very large adult, you’d want a minimum height of 30” – or half the length of the snake with an appropriate buffer of 6”.

To exclude a 5’ rattlesnake, which would be an exceptionally rare monster-sized snake in the desert southwest, you’d want 36” – or, again, half the snake length with a 6” buffer.

In almost all cases, 30” high will be just fine, and we have certainly installed quite a few fences where this is appropriate in Phoenix. However, as a regional standard, 36” is our recommendation as of 2020.

In the desert southwest, the largest rattlesnake you will see is a Western Diamondback in the 5’ range. Most are much smaller – around Phoenix and Tucson, where we work, a 4’ rattlesnake is a very big snake, but most top out around 3’. These sizes are based not only our thousands of documented captures and survey work, but all available published data, peer-reviewed literature, and basically anyone that measures them rather than eyeballing it. If you live in parts of Texas or the Southeast where rattlesnakes can get into the 6’ range, just use the same formula stated above and you’ll be covered.

To test all of this, we conducted some simple experiments.

First, we constructed a box with an adjustable floor to create varying heights of mesh to test. The box has two settings: The 24” height that is required by many HOAs, and the 36” height as per our standard. There is black duct tape along the top and sides to remove any sharp edges that could possibly injure the snakes, or deter them if they get up that high.

We put a wifi security camera on it and left the room. The quality is pretty bad, but for recording 24-hour video for days at a time, this is what we had available, and is more than enough to see what happens. 

Next, we need some snakes. 

The first snake is a huge snake from out of state that’s the largest diamondback we could get our hands on, and represents the largest possible rattlesnake you could encounter in Arizona … measuring at exactly 5’ long, nose to tail, excluding the rattle.

First, he went into the 24” box. It took him a little bit to figure out which direction to go, but when he did, he easily climbed out of the 24” height mesh. We repeated this several times and with each instance, he escaped more quickly than the last time. It’s clear that 24” tall fence will not keep a 5’ rattlesnake out of a yard.

Next, we tried the 36” height. The snake stayed in the box for a period of 5 days, moving often and trying to climb up and out at the corners as had previously worked so well with the 24” high fence, but was unable to escape. Eventually, it curled up in a corner and stopped trying, at which time we ended the test. From this, we can see a 36” tall fence can repel a rattlesnake up to 5’ long.

Next, we repeated the experiment with a more typically-sized rattlesnake that homeowners could encounter, at 4’ long. 

We placed her in the 24” high box, and waited.

It took her quite a bit longer, but she was eventually able to just get her nose over the top and pull herself up and over. Had the mesh been another 6” higher, this 4’ rattlesnake would not have been able to climb over.

When tested in the 36” box, she stopped trying quickly and spent most of the 5 day period of the test sleeping in the corner. 

As expected, a 36” height effectively repels a 4’ snake as it did the much larger 5’ snake, unholding the standard and underlying mechanics that we explained previously..

So the conclusion? 36″ is the correct height for snake fencing.

The 24” height that is so often required by HOAs and installed by do-it-yourselfers and pest control guys is not sufficient to protect your yard from rattlesnakes. To do the job effectively, you want a minimum of 30”, with a standard, recommended height of 36”.

Very importantly: a rattlesnake fence that lets some rattlesnakes in, is more or less an effective rattlesnake trap. In situations where a property can’t be protected correctly, either using the right materials or correct standard, it’s probably best to just do nothing at all and allow snakes that may find themselves in the yard to be able to leave. In many cases, the reasons why someone is not able to install a fence to the correct standards lie in the HOA regulations of the community.

It’s not at all that HOAs don’t care about their residents’ safety; quite the opposite in-fact, it’s just that exactly how high these snake fences should be isn’t really written down anywhere, or available as more than rough opinion, so decisions are often made that reflect aesthetic preferences over functional ones. But, in our experience, most communities are more than happy to adapt regulations based on solid reason, which is what we are providing here.

And to wrap it up: a few closing notes on the subject of fence-climbing rattlesnake that are important but don’t quite fit into the height question:

• Rattlesnakes can’t climb straight up a concrete or block wall like a slug; it’s physiologically impossible, their bodies just don’t work that way, and they can’t belly-crawl up a flat surface anymore than you or I can.

• It’s not always a matter of what they can do, but what they will do. Even with fencing installed, it’s a good idea to try and keep food, water, and shelter opportunities for them within the protected area to a minimum. With the right snake fence installed, you’ll have the best protection you possibly can, but I’d still not invite them over to perpetually test it. To illustrate this, what I often say is: when I go to the grocery store, if I really wanted to, I could maybe find a way to climb onto the roof somehow, but I don’t need to, so I don’t. If they went crazy and decided that the roof is where they’re going to store all the food from now on, I’m going to trying a lot harder to do something that I previously didn’t even care about doing. So, even with the fence installed, stick with best practice for rattlesnake prevention, too.

And lastly, keep in mind that everything discussed is for rattlesnakes specifically. There are some very good climbers, like Gophersnakes, Coachwhips, and kingsnakes, that can do fun things like climb straight up rough stucco walls – so seeing one of these snakes in a rattlesnake-fence protected area is not an indicator that the fence has failed in some way. I realize that many people choose to install rattlesnake fencing with the intention of not seeing any snake at all, because let’s face it, most people don’t like snakes, but we want to draw a big distinction between snakes that might look scary, and snakes that pose an actual danger to people and pets.

That’s it for now, be sure to take a look at our other snake-fence videos. In particular, the one that addresses mesh-size and baby rattlesnakes. And as always, if you have questions about rattlesnake fencing, leave them in the comments and get you the best answer we can. If we get enough of a similar question, we’ll work on another video just like this one. Be sure to get on our Facebook page for a lot more information as it happens.