Photo by Keith Benoist
The story behind the photo above goes this way: A couple of months ago a friend called and expressed concern about a snake that had taken up residence in the layered rocks of the waterfall feature to his outdoor fishpond. It was eating his goldfish, he protested, and could I do something about it? Efforts to remove the snake on his part had proven ineffective, as the snake would retreat deep into the layers of rocks whenever approached.
Never having seen the snake, I asked him if he could tell if the pupil of the snake’s eye was round or elliptical (cateye), to which he replied he’d no interest in getting close enough to make such a determination. I suggested it was likely a diamondback water snake, non-venomous, and that it was only doing what they do, which is eat fish. It was no big deal.
“Yes, it is indeed a very big deal,” he said, because where there had once been seven or eight goldfish, there were now only four or five; and goldfish, unlike lichen, did not grow on trees or, in this case, the rocks of his water garden.
“I can trap the snake,” I then told him, “but you will have to go to Walmart and purchase a small fish aquarium to which I can affix a funnel trap from discarded plastic bottles. Then I will lure the snake into the trap by placing fish in the tank where the snake can see and stalk them.”
In order for the procedure I had envisioned to succeed, he would, of course, have to purchase additional goldfish and a fish tank.
Negotiations stalled at this point; the expense the snake was visiting upon him already outstripping its presumed value as a potential zoo or biological lab specimen; and I heard nothing else from my friend until around noon one day, he sent me photographs he’d just taken of the snake, wedged between the rocks. Although they weren’t very clear photographs, the snake was clearly not a diamondback water snake, but was instead a rather healthy looking cottonmouth.
Demolition of the rock garden ensued.
In the end I was able to get the snake to see things my way, and I liberated him from the fishpond and relocated him to St. Catherine Creek National Wildlife Refuge, though only after attempting to get a decent photograph of him, which unfortunately I failed to do.
Humans, myself included, have only two hands, and although snakes have none, what they do have is an innate ability to slither into a duckweed-covered swamp with ease as a somewhat less-than-nimble bozo with a camera, tripod, two strobes, and a snake hook miscalculates in bringing all these devices to bear on a fugitive squamate intent on its renewed sense of freedom.
The ghosting seen here is the result of a two-second shutter. The snake was a beaut and was thoroughly well mannered, contrary to what some insist, for all cottonmouths, is a uniformly “aggressive” disposition. The cream line over the nose tip is the trailing flick of the tongue, just before our fellow’s future prospects were assured. The elliptical pupil can be seen in the two-toned eye.
Next time I’ll take a Haitian chieftain possessed of far better Juju than I was able to borrow that day.
