Snakes The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful

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Before I finished my country house, almost every morning when I threw back the tarp covering my building materials there would be a plump, mahogany-and-ochre copperhead staring up at me. These pit vipers, I discovered, are remarkably even-tempered; not one of my reclusive mouse-hunters ever struck, or even tried to crawl away. But because their new shelter was also my work area, I dutifully swept each morning’s visitor into a square-sided plastic trash can, then released the snake in a woodland a mile away.

Soon, though, another copperhead would show up and we’d go through the same routine. I knew that copperheads — besides being innately calm — also are sedentary and typically spend their entire lives within less than an eighth of a square mile, so none of my relocated captives were crawling back. But what I didn’t know until I started writing about snakes was that copperheads can be so numerous in biologically rich woodlands that every one of my uninvited guests — almost a dozen before their numbers began to thin — was a local resident of the surrounding five or six forested acres.

Rural residents anywhere southeast of the Great Plains might encounter a similar situation, but it’s no real cause for alarm. Unless stepped on or bumped, copperheads are reluctant to strike humans, and even when they do their venom is far less potent than that of rattlesnakes. In researching my books I found not a single death — regardless of treatment, or the lack thereof — among several hundred recorded copperhead bites. Nevertheless, I never left a copperhead coiled in hiding next to my stacked 2-by-4s.

Also present in the woods near my house were venomous coral snakes, which have red, black and yellow color bands. Unless you live in Florida, the Deep South, the eastern two-thirds of Texas or southern Arizona or New Mexico, any brightly banded little snake probably is a harmless milk snake, not a coral. Either way, leave it alone, because coral snakes can snap sideways with surprising speed and can open their jaws nearly 180 degrees to form an almost flat surface. With that kind of speed and spread, it’s easy for the coral snake to pinch out a fold of skin to bite. I once had a coral snake clamp onto the heavy leather of a welding glove with such power that it instantly forced out venom.

Only a minor penetration of the skin by the coral snake’s tiny fangs can deliver a dangerous dose of potent neurotoxins, which have evolved in these small relatives of cobras because their primary prey are other snakes that can be as large as or even larger than they are. The best option, whether it’s actually a milk or coral snake, is to simply admire the animal’s brightly hued, porcelainlike scales from a distance.

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