Rattlesnake Road

A back-road in rural Todd County, Kentucky

Rattlesnake Road, at
its intersection with
Allegre Road (Hwy. 171)

Last winter, I posted a photo I had taken of a creek ford on a rural road in northwestern Todd County, Kentucky. A visitor to the blog asked if the ford was on Rattlesnake Road. It wasn't -- it was on Flat Rock Road -- but the question planted a seed of curiosity in the wanderlust corner of my heart.

I decided that I would like to travel Rattlesnake Road when the weather dried up, and I said as much to the visitor. He (or she) replied:

Oh...then just trust me, Rattlesnake Road looks just about like your Flat Rock Road. I mean, you don't have to GO THERE...Rattlesnakes...and all...

My only trip there was in the summer years ago, the creek was incredibly high and there was no safe way to have crossed it. There was a roadway to the water's edge (and through it I presume) and a roadway came out the other side.

You could not have paid me any amount of money to get out of my car. Just the thought of it even today gives me the heebie jeebies!

Those words convinced me that I had to visit Rattlesnake Road and see its creek ford with my own eyes.

A Little Worm Snake

Life in Christian County, KY... More About Birds and Animals...

Isaac and I had an odd experience last night when we went for a walk.

The first part of the road descends for a quarter mile from the top of a fairly big hill to a low valley with a little creek. We were walking down this long slope when we saw a dead snake lying in the road.

We had paused to glance at it when I noticed another curious thing. A reddish-brown worm about six inches long was crawling uphill a few feet from us. He was moving along just like a snake over the gravel, and I said to Isaac, "Is that a big nightcrawler, or is it a little snake?!"

Isaac thought it was a worm, and he decided he'd move the little fellow over to the grass where the earth would be soft enough for him to burrow in. He bent over to pick it up, and the worm did a rapid squiggle and completely dodged him. It was amazing. We were both shocked. We had another discussion about whether it was a worm or a snake.

Then I tried to pick the little guy up and I didn't get him either. I did notice that he was strong for his size and that his skin was tender and a little tacky.

We were afraid we were going to hurt him, so we decided to let him go on his way. Later we told Dennis about it. He was positive that it was a little snake, and in retrospect, I agree.

Our little creature didn't have a belly band like earthworms and nightcrawlers do, nor did his S style of movement look like an earthworm's locomotion. And, as Isaac commented, his bottom side was lighter than his top side.

I'm sure that little snake's ability to squirm around so quickly helps him evade a hungry bird or anything else that decides to eat him.

I think he was a worm snake. They are 3 to 4 inches in length when hatched, and the adults are only a foot long. Their range includes most of Kentucky, and there are several Kentucky photos of the worm snake on the internet. I had never heard of this snake before!

Worm snake, Carphophis amoenus. Image courtesy
of U.S. Dept. of Energy (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Amazing Garter Snake Stories

Garter snakes in the Nebraska Sandhills

I have snakes on my mind lately because we've been seeing them. A few days ago, we saw some sort of a 4-foot snake headed across the yard. Yesterday, we saw a big blacksnake crossing the highway.

And today, Dennis was moving some railroad ties and found a big brown snake under them. It might have been the same snake we saw last summer in the hollow tree branch. He came to the house twice to tell me to come look at it. I hurried, but the snake disappeared both times before I got there. We think he was retreating to a hole in the ground.

So, I am feeling a bit "snakey" and this has reminded me of an amazing thing I saw when I was a kid in the Nebraska Sandhills.

We had a well that my mother used for irrigating her garden and the lawn. The pump sat at the bottom of a concrete-block pit, about six feet underground. One spring for some reason, my dad took the lid off that well, and what he saw inside was so amazing that he called us all to see it.

The well pit was filled with hundreds of garter snakes, twisted and twined together, and the entire mass of snakes was writhing and wriggling. It was like Medusa's hair on a much larger scale! The snakes had probably just awakened from hibernation and they were either preparing to leave their den or they were doing mating maneuvers.

An Audubon Magazine article talks about tangled heaps of snakes in its description of the mating of the red-sided garter snake, one of the native garter snakes of Nebraska. (The article is about Manitoba. Apparently, there are some incredibly large garter snake dens there.)

One more garter snake story -- also from my childhood in Nebraska. When I was about ten, my parents installed a new furnace. The furnace heated the house by running hot water through baseboard radiators and through coils under the floor.

During installation, the furnace guys drilled a hole through the foundation of the house to insert some of the necessary piping, and they didn't fill the hole when they were done. That fall as the days grew cold, many garter snakes crawled through that little hole looking for a haven for hibernation.

That was the Winter of the Snakes. In the heated crawlspace, it didn't get cold enough for them to really hibernate. They stayed active, and they crawled up into the house through any little openings they could find.

They liked to go inside the baseboard radiators where it was nice and warm. I remember lying in my bed more than one night, listening to a snake slither across the coils of the radiator.

They also liked the kitchen. One time my mother found a garter snake resting inside a cast iron skillet on the gas range (a warm spot because of the pilot lights.) Another time, she found one curled up in a bowl on the shelf.

Every now and then, a snake slithered across the floor on its way to somewhere. I suppose they were hungry! I was afraid to get out of bed at night because I might step on one in the dark!

I found one swimming in the toilet one day. Another snake crawled up into the wall of our bedroom, got stuck and died there, which made our room smell bad for a while.

My mother didn't take kindly to the invasion, and soon the handle of her broom was dented and bloody from beating garter snakes to death with it.

Of course, we located and plugged the hole when we realized we had a snake problem, but it was too late. When spring finally came, my mom opened the hole every morning so the snakes could leave and put the plug back in every night so they couldn't return. Finally we stopped finding them in the house, and my dad filled their entry-hole permanently with cement. Boy, were we glad!

Snake image from U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute.

Rattlesnake Stories from South Dakota Homesteaders

History and Old Stuff...

Prairie rattlesnake. Photo by Tom Wyant,
Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The following rattlesnake stories are quoted from the book, Mellette County, 1911-1961*. Mellette County lies just north of the Rosebud Indian Reservation in south central South Dakota.

The book tells the stories of pioneers who settled Mellette County, South Dakota, after the state of South Dakota reneged on an 1868 peace treaty that had given the land to the Sioux Indians. The land was thrown open for settlement in 1911, and thousands of people came to enter their names in a drawing to have the privilege to buy the prairie land.

Some common themes run through many of the pioneer stories--the blizzards, the grasshoppers and "Mormon crickets," the fenceless range, the repeated and dangerous well-digging until water was finally found, the diphtheria and influenza--and the rattlesnakes!

During the century since settlement began in Mellette County, prairie dogs (one of the rattlesnakes' main foods) have been reduced to a tiny fraction of their 1911 population. I doubt that the rattlesnakes thrive as they once did on the prairie lands, though I am sure they may still be found.

From the story of Jens J. Norup:

...Rattlesnakes were more than plentiful when we were all breaking sod with walking plows. It seems like I killed a snake nearly every day during the hot summer weather for three years or more. Three young homesteaders in less than three hours killed over 100 snakes in one day...

From the story of Otto Hansen:

...The first year, I borrowed a team from Dan Ryan, a neighbor, to go with a team I'd bought which were not broke to work. One day while breaking sod with them, I heard a rattler buzzing under my feet. The plow share had just skinned his back and pulled him out of his hold. Did I ever get out of that furrow! And I would not get back in the rest of that day. I wore boots after that. I broke 25 acres that year with a walking plow...

From the story of Mrs. Maymie Hutchens:

...Rattlesnakes were plentiful on the prairies and the homesteaders had to be very careful for they would crawl under their shacks and when you walked across the floor they would hiss and rattle...

From the story of Beulah Krieger Towne:

...When Dad had selected our ranch he had picked the most beautiful spot in the whole country, nestled at the north edge of a range of buttes. There were no buildings, so we slept in a tent the first night. The carpenters and hired men bedded down on blankets under the stars, inside a circle of lariat rope to keep the rattlesnakes away...

J. B. Brown and his bride of a few days arrived in October of 1912. They had a long, hard first winter, but they planted a big garden as soon as the snow drifts were gone and the weather had warmed during their first spring. From his story:

...Mrs Brown, armed with a long handled hoe, not only helped to keep the weeds down, but she also killed some 10 or 12 large rattlesnakes that crossed her path between the house and the garden...

From the story of Fay Kaufman:

...I went to see my mother one day. The dog was really up in the air about something. We both went out and there were two very large snakes. Mother sent me to the house for a gun. Of course, I had to pick up an automatic revolver which neither one of us knew how to shoot. A good thing we didn't get the gun off safety for it would have shot a full round before stopping. The rattlesnakes turned out to be the biggest bull snakes [a non-poisonous prairie snake] I have ever seen. Mother and I had many a laugh years later.

From the story of Mrs. Mae Strange Snyder:

Rattlesnakes were one of the hazards of those times. One day I rode down to see Mrs. George Kent. A rattler crawled across the road. I took the bridle off my horse and tried to kill it. About that time, Floyd Eaton happened by. He ended up killing 17 and said that some had crawled into their holes. It happened to be a den of them.

I am not sure which species or subspecies of rattlesnakes they had in Mellette County, South Dakota, but I suspect the rattlers they encountered were prairie rattlesnakes.

I took the photo below on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, about five miles south of the Mellette County line, along Highway 18 east of Mission, South Dakota.

Rattlesnake Country

* Source of the above quotes: Mellette County, 1911-1961, published by the Mellete County Centennial Committee of White River, South Dakota. No copyright information or publication date is given.

Technorati tags:

rattlesnakes
prairie rattlesnake
prairie rattler
Mellette County, South Dakota

Sand Adders: Hognose Snakes?

Native snake of the Nebraska Sandhills

When I was a child on the ranch in the Sandhills, the three snakes we saw most often were garter snakes, bull snakes, and sand adders.

In the previous sentence, I linked the words "bull snakes" and "garter snakes" to photographs, but I didn't link "sand adder" because I've never been completely sure what sand adders are!

Toad Eaters

Apparently, "sand adder" is a local name for the snake. A Google search for "'sand adder' Nebraska" has only one result -- Shirley Baker Jipp's mention of the sand adder in the online sample chapter from her book, Sand Beneath My Shoes. "Occasionally a saucy, brown sand-adder, gliding through the sandy path, startled us."

After reading about and looking at snakes on the internet this evening, I suspect that the sand adder was a hognose snake. The size, coloration and markings of the hognose are compatible with the sand adder.

I found several types of hognose snakes mentioned as residents of Nebraska -- plains hognose, western hognose, and eastern hognose. They are all fairly similar in appearance, and apparently all of them like sandy areas.

One other reason that I believe the sand adder was a hognose snake is that hognoses eat amphibians, especially toads. I remember several times finding a sand adder in the process of consuming some poor toad.

My mother was always very fond of the toads in her garden, and she once killed a sand adder with her hoe because he was eating one of them. I don't know what happened to the toad. I hope he survived!

Hognoses have an upturned upper lip which is the surefire identifying characteristic of this snake. I never looked closely enough at a sand adder's mouth to know if its upper lip was curled or not.

Dangerous As They Look?

Many Sandhill folk believed that sand adders were poisonous snakes, or at least had heard that they were poisonous and weren't taking any chances to disprove the rumor. As children, we certainly believed they were poisonous, and a few years ago, I mentioned sand adders to my Sandhills friend, Sammie, and she too had grown up thinking they were poisonous.

Despite our fear of the sand adder, I've never seen it listed as one of Nebraska's poisonous snakes. But after researching them this evening, I understand why sand adders (which were probably hognoses) were widely rumored to be poisonous.

The Fort Riley (KS) Army website notes, "These snakes have an interesting defense mechanism. When threatened, they will first hiss loudly and flatten their hood similar to a cobra. If that doesn't work, they will then regurgitate food, roll over and play dead."

The Audubon Magazine gives more detail:

It is probably no coincidence that the eastern hognose sometimes resembles the timber rattlesnake, while the western hognose appears to be modeled after the prairie rattlesnake.

Also known as "puff adders" and "blow vipers," hognose snakes respond to perceived threats by coiling and rattling their tails against leaves or grass, puffing up their bodies and flattening their necks, hissing and striking (though almost never biting).

If this fails, they roll on their backs and feign death, sometimes emitting drops of blood from gaping mouths and cloacae. Turn a "dead" hognose on its stomach and it will roll over on its back again.

The nonvenomous hognose lacks fangs, but it has enlarged rear teeth, perhaps designed to puncture toads that have inflated themselves as a means of defense.

I never threatened a sand adder, so it never had to go into the radical Phase 2 behavior with me. Phase 1 was enough to send me speeding away.

Trailquest.net comments that the easiest way to distinguish between the eastern hognose and a cottonmouth moccasin is the hognose's upturned lip. Apparently they look a lot alike, otherwise.

The University of Nebraska's website, "Poisonous Snakes in Nebraska," urges caution of snakes with a triangular head that is larger than the neck, then comments, "However, several other snakes, including garter snakes, hognose snakes, and bullsnakes may also display this characteristic, especially when alarmed."

Reasonable Caution

All in all, it's not surprising if Sandhill folks thought the sand adder (hognose?) might be poisonous. Our parents and grandparents wisely passed on to us a message of caution that they had heard in their own childhood days about this little snake.

I was an adult before I had a flash of insight one day and realized that the name of the snake was "sand adder" not "san-dadder" as I had always heard, pronounced and visualized the word. Now it seems I must admit that they weren't even poisonous. Somehow, I'm a bit disappointed.

Western hognose snake
Photographer: LA Dawson
Animal courtesey of Austin Reptile Service

Snake Stories

All In The Family... Another Trip Down Memory Lane... Life in Christian County, Kentucky...

Since seeing the snake in the hollow branch this morning, I've been thinking about snakes ever since.

I've had several interesting snake experiences here. I've told the story of one of them already today (in a comment at the above link), and here are a few more.

About ten years ago, we planted a long row of shrubs to grow into a hedge along our property line. I was trying to keep the grass down in the hedgerow because the shrubs were so small. I had mowed around the little shrubs as much as I could, and I was clipping along with a pair of grass shears when I suddenly realized that I could see a portion of a large snake just a few inches from my hand.

After a moment of horror, I realized that he was obviously kin to a blacksnake and thus harmless. I went to get my garden hoe so I could pull him out and see just how big he was, but when I came back he was gone.

I had several close encounters with him in my garden. One time I was picking beans and there he was, gliding along under the bean plants. I kept telling my husband and kids about him, but no one else ever saw him. Dennis started calling him "Fred".

One day, I found a six foot snake skin at the edge of the garden and finally I had proof that Fred's length was not just my imagination. A few days later, Dennis came in the house and said he had decided to postpone mowing one part of the lawn. He had been mowing around and around in an ever-smaller circle, and when there was only a little round patch of grass left... there was Fred in it!

One time Keely was collecting insects for a middle school science class. The deadline was near and she didn't have enough insects yet, so Isaac and I were helping her. It is surprisingly difficult to catch some types of bugs. It's also surprising how few different species of bugs you can find when you're looking for them.

We finally developed an odd technique that worked fairly well. When we saw a desirable bug, I slapped down the mesh kitchen strainer over him. Isaac scooped him up a big spoon as he tried to escape around the edges, and Keely operated the jar.

I said to the kids, "Let's roll over this rock and see if there's any bugs under it." We all knelt on the grass around the rock and assumed our positions -- strainer, spoon, and jar ready. I rolled the rock over and we all screamed in unison. There was a snake, of course.

It's a good idea in Kentucky to wear leather gloves when picking up rocks, branches, bales of straw, boards, and anything else that a snake might be under. That's a rule we were breaking when we were bug collecting. Fortunately, it was just a little non-poisonous snake.

When I meet small snakes in my garden, I try to relocate them. I know they're in the garden to eat bugs, but I just don't like snakey surprises. I get a 7.5 gallon bucket (deep!) and my shovel. Usually by the time I get back with these tools, the snake is gone, but if it is still there, I lift it as gently as I can with the shovel, place it in the bucket, and then release it in the woods along our lane.

We have never seen a poisonous snake on our place, but there are both copperheads and timber rattlers in this part of the county. A trash fire got out of hand and burned a few acres about 1/2 mile from here several years ago, and a big copperhead was killed somehow as a result of it. I don't remember whether it was hurt by the fire or it was killed by the firefighters. I do remember that they hung it on the barbed wire fence for everyone to see its size.

I wrote the following in 1997 for a now-defunct internet bulletin board that I enjoyed for several years:

I thought this might be interesting to some. It certainly gave me a strange chill to hear about it. A farmer neighbor who came in the place where I work told me this today.

This afternoon, the farmer was tending to his "dark barns"--which are the barns in which dark tobacco is hung and cured. A fire is kept smouldering on the dirt floor of a dark barn to fill it with smoke.

Tobacco farmers get slabs and sawdust from sawmills to burn in their dark barns. Slabs are the portion of a log cut off to square it up enough that boards can be cut, so they are rounded with bark on one side and flat with wood on the other side. Slabs don't stack well, so they are sold by the bundle. Farmers haul them all year around from the sawmills because they're hard to find during tobacco season.

This afternoon, this farmer opened up a bundle of slabs that had been brought early this spring to an isolated barn in a backwoods "holler" a couple miles off the highway. To his horror, when he cut the bands on the bundle and it fell open, he saw that it was squirming with copperheads. He killed 23 copperheads out of that bundle of slabs--two adult snakes that may have been two to three feet long judging from the length he indicated with his hands as he was telling the story--and 21 little ones.

I realize that snakes have their own important place in the ecosystem, but I don't blame that farmer for killing them. He didn't want 23 copperheads looking for a new home around his tobacco barn.

He told me that he has found copperheads before in bundles of slabs, but usually just one or two. This is the most he's ever found or heard of anyone finding.

Technorati tags:

snakes
copperheads
copperhead
Kentucky snakes
Christian County, Kentucky

Snake in a Hollow Branch

Life in Christian County, Kentucky... More About Birds and Animals...

A very large branch broke from one of the old maple trees in our yard during the storm on Saturday night. We didn't know it until Sunday. Today, a neighbor came over to help saw it up. He was packing up his saw and getting ready to leave when he noticed this snake curled up in a hollow section of log.

I don't think it's a timber rattler. I think it might be a rat snake.

Snake from front

Snake from back

Technorati tag:

snake