Snaked Out

The transparent tape fell off the fireplace and I replaced it with duct tape so stickily strong it takes two arms to pull it off the roll, and felt satisfied. Then at night I hear crisp-crackling in the living room and I know it's a young snake loosening the tape and shouldering its way out of its fireplace nest into my living room. Can't blame it. I turn over and go to sleep.

The next morning I meet the baby prairie ringneck, about five inches long, on the living room carpet. I try to pick it up off to take it outside. It flees. Grabbing a bowl with a lid I charge after it like it's Snakes on a Plane. I have to get these m----- snakes out of my m------  house. It's terrified, slips away and vanishes into the space between the carpet and wall.

Oh, well. If I lived in Puerto Rico or Mexico or Houston I'd be thrilled if my only problem was a snake hatchery in the fireplace. And snakes are ancient symbols of wisdom. . . it's just that I'm snaked out for the season. Then I go to the garage and am surprised to find there a shed snakeskin. I enjoy examining it and photographing the neat, translucent, geometrical webbing. Next, I return to the house and shower and see in front of me the hose connected to the hand sprayer and it looks the same. For a moment I think I'm hallucinating.

Rock 'n' Roll Reptile

A special guest star joined the army worms aka tent caterpillars in my dining room last night: a young blacksnake. His mom lives beneath the kitchen floorboards and is as thick as my wrist. Already crazed by the hundreds of crawling things in my house, I approached him with a camera hoping he'd dine for me on nearby caterpillars. He gave me a full-on, like totally natural, snake dance.

Drama on the Dining-Room Floor

(Not retouched. The flash was 5 inches from the floor.)

Opened the door to the laundry room and saw coiled there a three-inch baby blacksnake. It startled, crawled down a step and snaked away along the dusty dining-room baseboard, where he got caught by the tail in a spider's web and struggled to move forward. Couldn't. The more he thrashed the more he was caught. The spider, who'd been waiting, descended, about to make a meal.

I felt sorry for the snake and snapped the web around it to set him free. Sticky webbing and dust balls were still tangled around his tail, though, hobbling him as he tried to escape. He did all he could to free himself. Here's the 7-second video:

I terrified him trying to remove the dustballs and sticky webbing, but succeeded, and then he curled up for a moment to rest in a safe little pile. By then I had set the camera to "flash" and,as in the photo at the top, saw the reason that the small blacksnakes I meet with in sunlight often look bright silver, not black: reflectivity. Which probably protects them in some way.

Talking reassuringly, I manuevered the snakelet into a container and freed him outside where there was cover so he wouldn't become anybody else's dinner.