Summer is snake season. There are 25 native species of snakes sidewinding through Maryland. According to Glenn D. Therres, associate director of Wildlife and Heritage Service for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, these snakes are active from springtime until October.
I was vividly reminded that snakes were on the move by a recent encounter with an Eastern hognose. It happened on a warm Saturday afternoon on the Eastern Shore. My older son and I were walking through the grass, headed to our car en route to a lunch spot in Chincoteague, Va. Suddenly, a large mottled "stick" came to life in the grass in front of us.
The snake rose up, puffed up its head and began hissing.
"It's a cobra!" my son exclaimed.
I don't think so, I replied.
Granted, in its puffed-up condition the snake looked forbidding, like the viper that supposedly dispatched Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, back in August of 30 B.C.
Men and snake stared at one another for a while. Then my son and I sidled away — as did the snake.
It turns out this Eastern hognose is one of the great thespians of the reptile world.
"They are all bluff," Mr. Therres told me later. The puffed-up head is a defense that is supposed to scare predators. It worked on me.
The Eastern hognose sometimes pretends it is going to strike — but this, too, is an act. It keeps its mouth closed. Finally, if the puffed-up head and the fake attacks fail to scare trouble away, an Eastern hognose rolls over and plays dead.
"They play possum on you and feign death," Mr. Therres said, recounting the time he found an Eastern hognose on the road outside Tuckahoe State Park in Queen Anne.
"He just flipped over on his back as if he were saying, 'I'm not alive. I'm dead'," Mr. Therres recalled.
Toads are favorite snacks of this snake. There were a lot of toads hopping around in that yard in Chincoteague. So the snake, like my son and me, was probably just looking for some lunch.
Meeting a snake is different than the normal how-do-you-do with other creatures of nature. As a regular visitor to Chincoteague, I have gotten "up close and personal" with a variety of critters. Raccoons, herons, owls, egrets, bats, woodpeckers, rabbits and deer have, like the characters in the Disney "Little Hiawatha" cartoon, called me brother.
Yet seeing that Eastern hognose slither stirred both a sense of wonder and primal fears in me. Snakes are reptiles, some of the oldest creatures on earth. As I watched the Eastern hognose, I was reminded of what the late Art Cormier of Bridge City, La., once told me about the alligators he caught.
"They have been around since before the time of Christ," he said, his voice full of reverence.
Mr. Cormier was the gator control agent for Jefferson Parish, the man whom folks living in that jurisdiction of Louisiana called if they needed to have an alligator removed from their property. He was a religious man. On the walls of his home he proudly displayed a picture of Pope John Paul II — and several alligator heads.
The link between reptiles and religion is ancient, going all the way back to Adam, Eve and "the serpent."
To this day, almost every time I see a snake, I am reminded of the church service I attended in the early 1970s in Eastern Kentucky. It was a service for snake handlers. These were members of a religious sect who contended that if you were a true believer you could, as Scripture says, "take up snakes," and even if you are bitten by a poisonous one, suffer no consequences.
Technically, snake handling was illegal. But Kentucky politicians — Wendell Ford was governor at the time — were wily enough to know that going after the snake handlers could generate criticism from some quarters that they were "persecuting religion." Besides, Governor Ford — who had quite a bit of country in him — figured that people who handled poisonous snakes were unlikely to be a lasting problem.
I was a reporter for The Louisville Times and one day spotted a short news story saying that a 72-year-old man had died of a rattlesnake bite after a church service in London, Ky. A funeral was planned the next day at the same church. I drove out to London, a 150-mile trip that takes about as long as driving from Baltimore to Hagerstown. I introduced myself to family members of the deceased and to the minister who was conducting the service, a man whose day job was installing carpet. The theological explanation for how a long-standing member of their congregation had been brought down by the rattlesnake was not that the man's faith had wavered but rather that "God had called him."
My own faith was questionable, so I sat in the back of the church, right next to the door. About halfway through the proceedings, the snakes appeared. They were rattlers. The men of the congregation draped the snakes over their shoulders and swayed and hopped about, while women, standing on the other side of the church, whirled about and spoke in tongues. As the noise level rose, the minister grew more animated. At one point he placed a large snake in a small wooden box that had a hinged lid. Then he opened the lid and placed his head inside the snake box.
In all this excitement, the snakes remained relatively calm. Their heads moved, their tongues flickered. I heard the distinctive rattling of their tails. But they did not bite anyone.
Unlike the rattlers in that Eastern Kentucky church, the Eastern hognose I encountered the other day on the Eastern Shore was not poisonous. Of the snakes found in Maryland, only two — the timber rattlesnake and copperhead — have that distinction. Most, I was told by Mr. Therres, do a fine job of maintaining a balance in nature, eating mice, rats, toads and bugs.
Apparently, the Eastern hognose is such a good actor that if it is turned right-side-up while playing dead, it will immediately flip over on its back and resume the death pose.
I did not try this maneuver. For, unlike my acquaintances in Kentucky, I do not "take up snakes." I am pro-snake, but only at a distance.
—Rob Kasper