It has happened twice in the last year that I heard a loud noise coming from our A/C unit outside as if there was a rock banging around inside. Both times it turned out that a poor snake had crawled inside and was killed by the spinning blade. We have also found dead lizards and frogs inside as well. It is a terrible death for the poor animals to be cut into small bits by the spinning fan blade, and it also stinks when the corpses are rotting in the bottom of the A/C.

I started looking around and couldn’t find anything specifically to keep critters out of air conditioners. I did find this Air Conditioner Cover on Amazon.com to keep leaves out and decided to give it a try. The product has some good reviews but none of the reviews nor the product description itself mention anything about keeping snakes or other animals out. It turns out that it works perfectly:

The cover has been on the A/C unit for several months now and there is no way a snake, frog or lizard can get into it anymore. The four bungee cords hold the cover tight so that nothing can crawl under. On the sides and bottom I don’t see any openings where animals could crawl in either. I love this product and recommend it to anyone who has this problem. As a bonus it also keeps leaves out so the inside stays nice and clean. You can get this air conditioner cover on Amazon. I highly recommend it.

For a while I have been wanting to get a company to cut some branches off the big Live Oak tree in our backyard. Some branches were hanging over or very close to the house. In the front we also had a live oak with a large branch almost touching our electric wires. A few weeks ago a guy rang the doorbell and asked if we needed to have our palm trees trimmed. I said that that wasn’t necessary, but I asked him if he would be able to do the big tree in our backyard. After an estimate we decided to hire his company and a couple of days later he and two other guys came by to do the work.

Here are two before pictures:

One of the guys climbed into the tall tree with ease. He tied a thick rope to each limb before cutting it off with his chainsaw so that it could be lowered down slowly.

We found some Florida Rough Green Snakes in the branches that fell down. They were okay and Amy relocated them to another part of our yard.

We asked if they could leave some of the wood, so they cut them up and left us a nice little pile for our fireplace.

And here's an after picture with two large branches removed.