I write this knowing that there are people who will never abide snakes. No demonstration of how unlikely a cottonmouth is to bite you (we see such a demonstration in the video) will reduce the fear, no pest control benefit will be beneficial enough to tolerate even a corn snake. Some people will never like snakes.
Even for people who are fascinated by an indigo snake or a king snake, encountering a snake can be stressful. If we don’t know snakes well, we may worry that it’s venomous. If we can tell a cottonmouth from a water snake, we may wonder, will that cottonmouth strike out at us?
This is a big part of why I wanted to pursue this podcast topic. Some snakes can harm us, and we should respect that, but perhaps there is a way we can coexist with even those venomous snakes.
I also wanted to learn more about Florida’s diverse snakes. Our podcast conversation covered both, and much more, so I wrote two posts to accompany this episode of Coast to Canopy. If you want to get to know specialists like salt marsh snakes or pine snakes, backyard friends like a grey rat snake, or an impressive snake that is disappearing from our landscape, such as the eastern king snake, check out the other post.
In this post we focus on the snakes we might see: in the forest, on the water, or in our yards.
Meet our guests
- Kim Sash is the Biological Monitoring Coordinator at Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy.
- Pierson Hill is Research Associate with the FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.
- My cohost is Regan McCarthy, Interim News Director for WFSU Public Media.
If you’re wondering about the dynamic between Kim and Pierson, they are a married couple. They have appeared on the WFSU Ecology Blog numerous times throughout the years. Too many to list them all, but if you click on their names in the list above to peruse their video appearances.
Web sites/ research mentioned in the podcast
During our conversation, Kim and Pierson mentioned a couple of sites where people could report rare snakes or invasive snake parasites. Kim also mentioned a research paper she co-authored. Here are links to these resources:
- Report rare snakes to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. A couple of the snakes they’re looking for were guests on our podcast: the Florida pine snake and the eastern king snake. They’re also looking for eastern indigo snakes. FWC is also looking at iNaturalist observations of their target species.
- To report sightings of invasive snake lungworms., email slam.conservation@gmail.com or tag slam.conservation on Instagram. SLAM stands for Snake Lungworm Alliance and Monitoring. I’ll have a separate story on lungworms, also known as pentastomes, later this week.
- Research paper by Kim Sash and Dr. Bruce Means about the decline of eastern king snake populations in north Florida.
Coast to Canopy blog posts are curated transcripts. My notes appear in italics.
Snakes (venomous and non) in the backyard
Cottonmouths and humans
Pierson Hill: The most common venomous snake people are going to see in their yard in Florida are cottonmouths or water moccasins. And they tolerate human land uses fairly well, and can persist around retention ponds or canals.
Regan McCarthy: Is that the same name for one snake, a cottonmouth or a water moccasin?
Pierson Hill: Water moccasin is kind of a colloquialism, just like oak snake is for the grey rat snake. Herpetologists call them cottonmouths, and then if you’re talking to folks at the boat ramp, they may refer to them as a water moccasin.
Rob Diaz de Villegas: A lot of people I talk to, even people who tolerate snakes, they say if they see a cottonmouth in their backyard, that’s the one snake they’re going to take care of. How likely is a cottonmouth to to bite you?
Pierson Hill: Cottonmouths have this reputation for being dangerous and they’ll chase you and are very aggressive. All of that is nonsense. They put on a pretty impressive bluff display. Although, they’re short, fat, slow snakes, and so they’re not very good at crawling away. And so, to make up for that, they stand their ground, they’ll shake their tail, and then they gape and open their mouth and flap their head back, and they have this bright white interior lining of their mouth.
And it’s just a threat display: I’m here. Don’t step on me. Don’t mess with me. Let’s go on our mutual ways.
How likely is a cottonmouth to bite you? (This is not an invitation to provoke them)
Pierson Hill: But to actually get a cottonmouth to strike or bite, you really have to harass or physically engage with the snake. And so there have been behavioral studies done where people have approached cottonmouths in the wild.
These are herpetologists doing these studies. And they’ll, stand next to the snake within striking distance and count how many of them actually strike and then step on the snake, see how many of them strike, and then actually have a fake hand that grabs and strikes them. And, it takes it all the way to actually grabbing with the hand before you even have, you know, almost 20% of them actually biting it.
Kim Sash: And I catch a lot of cottonmouths in our snake traps, and we actually bring them in into the office in a bucket because they’re venomous, so they don’t get transported in a pillowcase. But, we tube them. So, you put them in an acrylic tube in order to process them, work them up.
They rarely even strike at us, and we’re really manipulating them. And… I’m not telling people that they should go pick up Cottonmouth. I’m not saying to do that. Don’t test your luck.
What Kim and Pierson are saying is that, if you encounter a cottonmouth, it has no interest in attacking you.
Coexisting with snakes (to the extent possible)
Regan asks about relocating snakes we find in our yards.
Pierson Hill: As a herpetologist, though, moving a snake is extremely disruptive to it. As Kim was talking about earlier, that snakes are very attuned to the landscape in which they grew up, and they know every little hole. They know every nook and cranny, where to feed, where to drink water, where to find mates.
When they’re picked up and moved, it’s like taking you and dropping in a whole other city without a job. And you have to, they have to start over. And so they’re extremely vulnerable in those first weeks and months, too, getting run over by car or grabbed by a predator while they’re trying to reorient.
I try to suggest that people live alongside snakes to the extent possible. For instance, if you have kids or dogs in your yard, you can teach your kids as soon as they’re able to learn what venomous snakes are. I mean, I knew what a rattlesnake was by the time I was 5 or 6 years old, thanks to my dad.
Snake training your dog
Pierson Hill: You can do what’s called snake aversion training with your dogs.
Kim Sash: Our dogs are scared of pillowcases.
Pierson Hill: And garden hoses.
And it’s because we share our homestead with… cottonmouths are the most common venomous snake in our yard, if not the most common snake. We also have eastern diamondback back rattlesnakes, and we love sharing our property with them. And so we train our dogs to be afraid of snakes. Depends on what your dog’s personality is, what training technique will work best with them.
People can research that online.
Snake habitat in your yard
Kim Sash: I would say to I mean, your yard is habitat. And so there’s a way to make it not be snake habitat. Like, if you have a bunch of trash laying around or a piece of tin on the ground, or a big log pile, you’re creating snake habitat. So you can also not create that. So by keeping things kind of picked up a little bit more tidy.
You can decrease the likelihood that one of those snakes is going to be in your yard because they don’t like to be exposed. Like I said, they’re ectotherms (cold blooded animals). So they need shady places to hang out, places to shed. So if you’re if you’re creating those spaces in your yard, you’re gonna run into a lot more snakes.
Site fidelity in snakes
Kim Sash: If you if you see a snake in your yard, just like I talked about having this high site fidelity, that means they have memory, right? So they can remember when they had a pleasant experience somewhere. And they can also remember when they had an unpleasant experience somewhere.
So even spraying a snake with a garden hose is going to be- you could stay far, far away from them. You can spray them. That’s not going to be a pleasant experience for them. And so there’s been studies. They show that if they have an unpleasant experience somewhere, they will avoid that place. So you can also train the snake.
Like a grey ratsnake has a seven acre home range. So that’s a pretty big area. So if in your area, you have more of a wooded site, chances are that’s where it’s spending 90% of its time. And it’s on a foraging bout when it comes into your yard. And then it’ll probably go back to wherever it was.
But I do understand. I mean, as someone that has had their dogs bit by a venomous snake, you know, I can understand why people feel that way, and especially with young children. But, you know, in most cases, especially with cottonmouth, you know, a very survivable bite. Yeah.
Pierson Hill: But medically significant.
Herping in north Florida
Rob Diaz de Villegas: We talked earlier about herpers. So talk about as a hobby. If you’re interested in snakes and watching them respectfully and photographing them, not handling them, talk about that as a hobby. What, where, and when do you want to go herping? Where are good places.
Kim Sash: Well, a lot of people go to the Apalachicola National Forest. I mean, road cruising 20 years ago was a lot more exciting than it is now. We used to see a lot of snakes on the road, crossing the road. It’s just not like that anymore. A lot of these species are really disappearing. Some of that has to do [with] the habitats changing.
There’s less prescribed fire on the landscape.
Around wetlands is always a good place to look for snakes.
The seasonality of herping
Kim Sash: Usually the shoulder seasons are usually the best. It’s hot right now. As an ectotherm… snakes are really laid up right now. We’re not catching a lot. Things are really slow, but in the spring and fall are when you really see there’s breeding going on during those times a year.
And they’re looking for mates, or they’re looking to feed up before they’re going to hole up for the winter. So, that’s kind of when we usually go.
Pierson Hill: It kind of depends on what species you’re hoping to see. Different species have different seasonal activity patterns, like she mentioned earlier, that [pine snakes] are very spring active and you don’t really see them the rest of the year. Some species are strictly nocturnal. You’re not going to see them unless you’re out at night.
And then a lot of the amphibians I study, if I’m looking for them, they’re only breeding during the winter months. When and where really depends on what you’re hoping to see. We’re lucky, especially here in the Panhandle, that we have so many public conservation areas that people can go to.
Safely and respectfully observing a snake
Pierson Hill: We have our state wildlife management areas (WMAs), our state parks, our state forests, we have national forests, we have a national wildlife refuge. And so there’s a lot of opportunities to get out there and see all different types of habitats and all the different types of species that live in them. Just be aware of the regulations of what piece of property you’re on.
Kim Sash: Handling a snake is incredibly stressful for it. I mean, these guys (they brought into the studio) are used to being handled. But the snake in the wild, that can be a really big stress. Just try to get a picture of it doing what it’s doing. As you know, the best way to go about it, especially if you’re not sure of your snake ID, then you really should not be handling any snakes.
There’s a lot of snakes that look very similar to each other. And you don’t want to make a bad mistake. You know, we’ve got coral snakes and scarlet king snakes. Very similar looking snakes. But, you know, you have to either you remember the rhyme, which is, which I never remember. If red touch yellow, kill a fellow.
What’s easiest for us is, the two warning lights and a stoplight are red and yellow. So if red and yellow are touching, then you have a coral snake. Otherwise, it’s usually a scarlet kingsnake. But, yeah, a lot of mimics, so need to be careful of that.
Snakes and roads
Rob Diaz de Villegas: Roads are kind of a threat to snakes, aren’t they?
Pierson Hill: Huge threat. And becoming worse and worse every day as we’re developing more and more. Traffic is increasing, especially in Florida. And so big, day active diurnal snakes like the Florida pine snake, the eastern indigo snake… We have a couple other big day active snakes, like, the coachwhip – roads really take a heavy toll on them.
Regan McCarthy: Diurnal. That means active during the day, active.
Pierson Hill: During the day, as opposed to nocturnal, which is active during the night.
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