A Few Encounters with Snakes

Forrest M. Mims III

Before you read what follows, please glance at Fig. 1 to see a tiny, glistening creature in my hand.

This tiny animal is dark gray on top and pink underneath. He shines nicely in the light, because his scales are very smooth. He has tiny scales and a much tinier forked tongue because he is a snake.

This little snake wouldn’t harm you if he wanted to. Place him on the ground, and this very shy creature will immediately poke his head in the soil and try to escape. Eventually he will manage to drill a hole through the leaves and dirt. He is such an efficient tunneling machine that he’s sometimes called the worm snake. But since he's so tiny, he’s called the Texas blind snake (Leptotyphlops dulcis dulcis).

Some people love to collect and study snakes. They call themselves herpetologists. But most folk have a fear of these legless reptiles. They think snakes are slimy, which they aren’t. Some think all snakes are poisonous, but most are not.

A few weeks after a major rise of the nearby Geronimo Creek, my neighbor, Dr. Jack Deetjen, and I slogged through the mud to have a look at the creek. As we looked at the muddy water, suddenly Jack noticed something dark, long and thick about a meter away from his boots. It was a big cottonmouth water moccasin (Ancistrodon piscivorus), the first one I have seen that close. We took some pictures, backed away, and decided to leave.

The cottonmouth is a venomous and potentially very dangerous snake. So are rattlesnakes, coral snakes and copperheads. I’ve seen all but copperheads on our place along the Geronimo Creek. Kenneth Mueller, who built our house, said he once saw a copperhead on the back porch.

The vast majority of snakes are non-venomous. Many people think that a snake in the water is automatically a cottonmouth, but this isn’t correct. At least two other species of water snakes call the Geronimo Creek home. One is the diamondback water snake (Nerodia rhombifer). Mature diamondback water snakes can be more than 1.25 meters (around four feet) long. Their distinctive diamond pattern fades with age, and older specimens look quite dark. This and their generally bad attitude often cause people to confuse them with water moccasins.

If teased or cornered, diamondback water snakes will strike and can deliver a nasty bite. But unlike the rattlesnake with a similar name, they’re not poisonous.

The diamondback water snakes along the Geronimo Creek like to hang out on bushes or limbs over the water, which is a good place to be when your favorite food is fish and frogs. Sometimes as many as three diamondback water snakes hide in the thick foliage of a bush that hangs over the creek on our place. Most of them drop into the water when they realize they’ve been spotted, but the big ones are pretty bold and sometimes stay in place.

Once while I was clearing debris from a fence after a big flood, I happened to grab a water snake while pulling out a big clump of grass. Water snakes can be pretty aggressive, but this one was as surprised as I and only wanted to escape. I took it to a spring, and it glided off toward the creek.

Forrest M. Mims III and his science are featured online at www.forrestmims.org and www.sunandsky.org.