wildlife

Snake Wise

John Lane — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:36:14 -0400

The first snake that I see in the spring is a sign of winter's passing. I've always been crazy about snakes.

I don't know everything that contributed to this abiding affection I hold for reptiles. When most people head for the big cats or the elephants at the zoo, I look on the map and find the snake house so I can ramble big-eyed among the odd representatives of the earth's serpentine fauna.

When I was in college at Wofford back in the 70's one of my best friends was a legendary snake man named David Scott. David was a budding herpetologist (a scientist who studies reptiles) and I was his English major sidekick. We'd spend afternoons out at an old stone quarry near Pacolet looking for coachwhips, those rare black & tan, two-tone snakes with large scales. We'd catch these speedy beasts sunning on the rock ledges left behind after mining. Coachwhips are nervous snakes. Sometimes they'd bite us and we'd wear our wounds like soldiers returned from the war. They weren't poisonous, so a little peroxide would clean us up.

We called this extracurricular activity "snake hunting," though we never killed anything. We were collectors, in it for pure joy, and alos to build David's slide file of every species of snake he could find.

On some spring evenings we'd drive all the way to Landrum in David's Toyota Landcruiser and ride Highway 11 up on the mountain front looking for snakes warming on the asphalt. Once we saw a big timber rattlesnake just run over by truck, but often the snakes were alive and we'd stop on the shoulder, seize our wildlife prizes-mostly black snakes and king snakes— and haul them back to Wofford for David's photo shoots.

David went on to become a scientist with a degree in ecology. He's caught snakes all over the world and published scientific papers about some of their habits. He's known just as well for his photographs of snakes, salamanders and lizards that have appeared in dozens of books and magazines all over the country. I'm still in English, though one of my many side hobbies is keeping up with my love for snakes.

So yesterday my Alaska friend Venable Vermont was in town, and we took the afternoon to go to Glendale Shoals and put boats on the water. It's been cold and windy, and it's looked more like winter was trying to knock the door down on last time. It wasn't exactly snake weather, so I wasn't even thinking about seeing one.

There were lots of people fishing at the shoals. They watched us slipping back and forth across the fast current in our canoe and kayak, just "messing about in boats" as they say in THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS.

We didn't feel like dunking in the cold water, so we decided to walk around the big rapid at Glendale we call "Lawson's Dawg" because it looks so much like a famous falls on the Chattooga called "Sock ‘em Dog." It's a seven-foot ledge of rock, a kayaker's dream on a warmer day. As we were wading through the shallows to portage a local acquaintance greeted us, out walking along the creek.

"Look out!" he said, jumping back just as he approached the creek's edge. "A cotton mouth water moccasin!" I waded over and there was a large water snake coiled in the grass. It didn't move.

Ah, spring was here. My first snake of the year was right at my feet.

I looked closely, and I knew that it likely wasn't a poisonous cottonmouth. It was more likely the common Northern Water Snake of our region. I've always trusted that the range maps in field guides as accurate and the closest population of poisonous water snakes is considerably east of Glendale, closer to Columbia. The locals though are convinced this isn't true. "Water Moccasin" describes any serpent along our waterways. David Scott's spent much of his career trying to correct this misconception, and I knew I wouldn't make much progress on this cool March afternoon.

I noticed my friend Venable doesn't like snakes, and so he was keeping his distance. I talked on for a few minutes, disagreeing about the nature of the snake at our feet. I tried to quote the field guide, chapter and verse. I brought up range maps. "They're here," my Glendale acquaintance, said. "You open that snake's mouth and it's white as cotton inside."

As we talked the snake slid safely away into the cold river, escaping our discussion of which name to call it by. It's encouraging to me to know that humans settled this land, and there's still discussion as to what else inhabits it. I moved downstream with Venable into the spring with one snake already under my belt.

Brief Encounters on the Wild Side

John Lane — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:30:48 -0500

I'm hoping this will be the spring we'll see river otters in the creek behind our house. I've had reports of people seeing them at the mill dam a half mile downstream, and just last week someone wrote to say they'd seen three otters fishing in Four-Mile Branch, a large tributary of Lawson's Fork not far away. There's something about a possible river otter sighting that would fulfill my fauna longings for the season.

Coyotes

John Lane — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:08:39 -0500

Out here our house is turned to the linear wildness along the creek like a big ear. We listen for what happens in the timber and thick undergrowth below us with the fascination of someone sampling a new CD. If I hear a bird I don't know, I try to track it down for identification, adding its name to our "play list" of what this place might spin in our direction. I scribble the name in the back of an old field guide, a note as to what is passing by.

Where the Wild Things Are

John Lane — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:01:42 -0500

One percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states is what might be considered "wilderness." Ninety-nine percent is utilized in some way for human profit-urban areas, suburbs, logging, mining, grazing. In 10,000 short years we humans have found ways to extend our shadow over the whole reach of a peopleless continent.

Abiding Image

John Lane — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:52:20 -0400

It's seven in the morning. Coffee steams from my cup and I've been up for nearly an hour. I've already been out with the dog. It's cool today, a good break from all the unseasonably warm weather we've had. The drought has lifted for a little while. My rain gauge, unemptied, still tells me last week we had over an inch and a half of rain here east of Spartanburg. It's felt like the South again for a few days-moist and verdant. Now autumn has suddenly arrived, and the dry weather will likely return if the patterns hold true. The sourwood trees are turning that burnt red that for me signals fall. Winter is only 12 weeks away.

Migration Station

John Lane — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 08:25:38 -0400

For the last two weeks I've been seeing the monarchs migrating through. No, I don't mean that convoys of kings and queens have been trucking down the interstate. I'm talking about the most royal of butterflies, the orange, black, and white monarch.

There's a Vast Green Desert Among Us

John Lane — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 08:35:27 -0400

I don't spend much time channel surfing, but the other morning I was stuck in the house waiting for the cable man, and I wandered into a program on ANIMAL PLANET called "Backyard Habitat." I'll admit I was fascinated. On the program a perky former Miss Florida in khaki pedal pushers and a friendly naturalist from the National Wildlife Federation fly all over the country helping families revamp their old-style yards into little pieces of territory friendly to wildlife. It's a sort of "green eye for the normal guy."

Snakes in the Yard

John Lane — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:44:14 -0400

It's been over a year since I wrote about snakes, but I think it's time. SNAKES ON A PLANE has brought my reptile friends into the spotlight, and once again they're getting a bad rap.

I have enjoyed encounters with snakes for three decades now and still mark my years by the first snake I see in the spring. The year 2006 it was a Northern Brown Snake out in the yard, a slug, earthworm, and insect eater only 10 inches long. It turned up in some wood I was moving. I picked it up, admired it, and then placed it back under the log.

A Snapping Turtle in a Pick-up Truck

John Lane — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

"Snappers are the most widely distributed of North American turtles … they are abnormally reclusive, and when one makes a public appearance it is not an event to be passed over lightly," writes my friend Franklin Burroughs, a low-country South Carolinian transplanted 30 years ago to Maine, Burroughs is writing about a big female snapper he'd chanced upon in the dirt road in front of his family's farmhouse in Bowdoinham. "They come out in late spring," he writes, "or early summer… They need sandy soil to lay their eggs in."

The Beavers

John Lane — Sun, 22 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I just walked with my dog down to the creek. We dropped a few dozen feet of elevation off the ridge where we built our house into the board flood plain of the Lawson's Fork. Then we turned west and hiked up the sewer right-of-way to the confluence with Cold Water Branch. The smaller creek got its name because in its headwaters seven springs rise.