An Unfortunate Case of Mistaken Identity

It was almost noon, and I was breaking up some ramen noodles  for lunch when the first text message came in.

"Dad wants to know what kind of snake this is," the message said.  "Hang on...I'm sending you a picture."

An email message popped up in my inbox with a link to the picture.  I opened it and there was a  gray sinister-looking snake, coiled up against the side of the house, head flattened out.   I looked closely at the picture and felt a little knot in my stomach.  It looked like a water moccasin, or cottonmouth as they're also called.

Ramen forgotten, I turned back to the computer and opened The Google.  "Cottonmouth snake," I typed in.  As the search results loaded, another text message came in.  This one was much more urgent:  "It was lunging at us and chasing us! And now it's on the porch and we can't find it!"

Of the cottonmouth, the Google said:

Agkistrodon piscivorus is a venomous snake, a species of pit viper, found in the southeastern United States. Adults are large and capable of delivering a painful and potentially fatal bite. When antagonized, they will stand their ground by coiling their bodies and displaying their fangs. Although their aggression has been exaggerated, on rare occasions territorial males will approach intruders in an aggressive manner.

Why on earth would a water moccasin be at our house?  The nearest body of water was the stock pond, about 1/8 of a mile or so down the hill.  But the why wasn't really important at the moment.  What mattered was finding the snake before it got under the house!  I grabbed my keys, left a message for my boss, and headed out the door.

All the way home, I was filled with dread, thinking about all the different ways the snake could get into the house (if you read my previous posts, you might remember that it's a very old house, with lots of cracks and gaps where critters can find their way in).  I thought about all the hiding places - the flower beds, the garden, the woodpile....  How would we ever feel safe again if we didn't find it?

But as I pulled in the driveway, the family motioned for me to stop.  They had it cornered up against the house, and didn't want to risk me scaring it off.  RAF was standing guard with the garden hoe, and we talked for a while, trying to get a better look, and trying to decide what to do.

Eventually we decided the best course of action was to shoot the snake, so we borrowed a 12-gauge shotgun and RAF killed it with one shot.

I put the snake into a bucket and took it to my mom's and dad's house.  My mom looked into the bucket at the snake and asked, "Did it smell bad?"  No, but it was sure aggressive I told her.

The next day I sent the picture to Dr. Knight, who teaches Biology at the local university.  It could be a cottonmouth, he said, but it looked more like a blotched water snake.  "But you still have to be careful around them," he added.  "They are very 'bitey.'"  How could I know for sure?  Look at the snake's eyes, he advised.  A cottonmouth has vertical pupils, like a cat, with deep pits and a very strong triangular shaped head.  The water snake's eyes would be round.

When I got home, I took a stick and carefully lifted the snake out of the bucket.  The pupils that stared out of his lifeless eyes were perfectly round.

"I didn't think it was a water moccasin," my mom told me later, "but I figured you two knew more about it than I did."  As it turned out, we didn't know anything about cottonmouth snakes after all.

Poor little blotched water snake.  Our fear and our ineptitude at snake identification brought a tragic end to his foray into our yard.  His coloration and behavior may have evolved they way they did because mimicking a cottonmouth gave him an advantage against his natural predators.  But, as Dr. Knight pointed out, the coloration that offers protection against natural predators becomes a risky way to dress when you bump into a frightened human.