What Do Garter Snakes Eat?
What Do Garter Snakes Eat?
Garter snakes can be considered to be harmless. However, they are carnivores. Garter snakes mainly eat meat from insects, small rodents, and other animals. They are strictly carnivores. Garter snakes don’t eat plants, fruits, flowers, and vegetables. This article will go over the eating habits of garter snakes.
Garter Snakes Eating Habits
Garter snakes do eat ants, bugs, flies, grasshoppers, and lady bugs. That’s not all either. Garter snakes will also eat aphids, crickets, roaches, wood ticks, wasps, and honey bees. This due to their carnivorous nature. Based on this, garter snakes don’t eat apples, berries, fruits, lettuce, strawberries, tomatoes, or vegetables. These snakes will only eat meat from other animals an insects. So, you’re not going to see them feeding on any kind of fruit or vegetable.
Garter snakes do eat at night, however, they are more active in the day, which is all when they will eat the most. In addition to that, garter snakes can eat amphibians, birds, baby birds, bees, bunnies, beetles, cicadas, cockroaches, and caterpillars. These garter snakes can also eat bird eggs, chicken eggs, duck eggs, robins eggs, and turtle eggs. It’s quite common for them to feed on eggs.
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As you are able to see, garter snakes enjoy eating meat while avoiding plants, fruit, flowers, and vegetables. Garter snakes also like to eat bullfrogs, chipmunks, chicken, carpenter ants, fish, goldfish, hornworms, and isopods.
A garter snake will eat bird seed but rarely. If anything, bird seeds will only cause they them to get closer to birds, which is what they really want. Most garter snakes will certainly eat dead mice, earthworms, earwigs, frogs, field mice, mosquitoes, mealworms, and June bugs. These are all a part of the diet of a garter snake.
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Since they are carnivores, garter snakes don’t eat flowers, grass, plants, or vegetables. On the other hand, garter snakes will eat rats, rabbits, spiders, squirrels, slugs, snails, geckos, lizards, and pill bugs. You should also know that all snakes are carnivores just like garter snakes; they all have essentially the same diet. As a matter of fact garter snakes can eat cats, dogs, ducklings, dubia roaches, guppies, humming birds, koi fish, kittens, ticks, toads, and tadpoles. At the same time, some of these animals can be large for a garter snake to eat. However, it depends on their venoms and the animals that they bite.
Garter snakes aren’t harmful to humans despite the fact that they are venomous. Large garter snakes can eat gophers, fish in the pond, muskrats, nightcrawlers, praying mantis, turtles, small fish, red wigglers, wax worms, wall lizards, and wolf spiders.
Other animals and insects that garter snakes do eat includes Japanese beetles, moths, moles, voles, newts, pond fish, potato bugs, rolly pollies, tree frogs, robins, and raw chicken. Furthermore, garter snakes enjoy eating liver, salamanders, superworms, skinks, snakes, rattle snakes, gypsy moth caterpillars, and copperheads. Yes, garter snakes do eat grubs, other snakes, mice in the wild, poisonous snakes, minnows, and rose red minnows.
