Today, as you undoubtedly know, is World Snake Day, and while you might think this is one of those crass bogus holidays that I make up to feature some convenient photos on hand, this is for realsies. Knowing that this was coming up, I went out to find some world snakes to feature, knowing that at the very least I was in the right geographic area (the world) to do so.
This is a northern water snake (Nerodia sipedon sipedon,) and here’s the deal: I was reasonably certain that I’d find at least one example by going over to the neighborhood pond at night, when they’re most active. Not to mention that the days have remained brutally hot and even blog posts aren’t worth the abuse of searching around in the open for any extended period of time during the day. So as the last light was fading from the sky, I ventured over to see if there was any activity – for some reason, foregoing the camera and taking only the smutphone. This meant that I saw three separate snakes on shore, but could get no decent photos of any of them because smutphones suck – I really don’t know why I went without a real camera, but I was thinking I might set up the video rig instead and do it as moving pictures. But since all I’d seen were snakes that were motionless until I got too close, I instead came back with the macro rig (different brackets and lighting,) for my blog images. And that meant that only one of the three had reappeared for the holiday.
And you see here what might be the reason why. As snakes get close to shedding their skin, they eyes get cloudy and they tend to bask more to help the skin dry out and peel away, and so this one returned to the same spot twice after having been spooked from it by my shenanigans. This was a relatively small specimen, about 1/4 the mass of one of the others that I tried using the shitphone to get pics of, and I could have easily picked it up, but there was no point. First, I’d get bitten exuberantly, because water snakes do that even when they’re not overly defensive from not being able to see through their cloudy eyes well, but this has happened to me many times before and it really isn’t an issue. More, I’d have to be juggling the camera one-handed if I did so, while trying to manually focus by the light of the headlamp because that’s too dim for autofocus. Plus the snake had already been disturbed enough.
I saw plenty of other subjects that were not world snakes last night as well, and they’ll be along soon. But it’s kinda busy today and I wanted to get this out before too much came up and I missed the holiday – you know how important those are to me.