I was walking in my neighborhood a few months ago and to my right, a flash of movement caught my eye under a bush. It was a black racer - no doubt a female, being chased by another, no doubt a male. It was that time of year, and the snakes were getting frisky.
Snakes are active year-round here in Southwest Florida, but springtime means more activity, and that often means more danger for them.
A while back I heard grown men shouting in front of my house. I rushed out to the street as some county employees were about to dispatch a small snake with a shovel. "Stay back! It's a copperhead!" they said as I approached. They were shocked when I intervened and picked him up gently and explained to them that there are no copperheads in our area, and that this was a harmless baby corn snake.
"I'd just as soon kill 'em all," one fellow said.
"Then you must like rats and mice a lot more than snakes," I replied. "If you kill the snakes, you're asking for more rats and mice."
"Never thought of it that way," he said. "But how do you know which ones are dangerous?"
That's easy for us on Marco Island. There are very few if any venomous snakes left on the island. If any remain, they're probably pygmy rattlesnakes which are easy to identify by their thick, grayish, spotted bodies, spade-shaped head, and vertical (cat-like) pupils, plus a small (often non-functional) rattle. A cottonmouth may also wander into the mangroves from time to time. But if you leave them alone, you can be sure they'll leave you alone.
The snakes we're likely to see here are almost always one of the following harmless varieties:
The Black Racer is most common - a sleek black snake (gray with darker blotches when they're newborns), two or three feet long, with a distinctive white chin. As their name suggests, they're fast and often disappear before you really get a look at them. They have to be fast to catch lizards, mice, and baby rats. They'll bite if you grab them, but not many of us are fast enough to do so, and their bite is harmless anyway.
The Corn Snake is a beautiful snake, sometimes four feet long, with orange and brown coloration. They're most active from dusk to dawn here, when their favorite foods, mice and rats, are also active. They are the most common snake to be kept as a pet.
The corn snake's cousin, the yellow rat snake, may also be found on rare occasion on the island. Just to confuse us, they're grayish when young.
The Mangrove Water snake is also strikingly beautiful - and equally harmless. It's rust-red to orange in color, and as the name suggests, they live in and around mangroves, sometimes venturing farther inland.
The Southern Ringneck snake sometimes shows up, but they're so small and secretive that you're unlikely to see one unless it's been flattened by a car when crossing a road. The smallest snake on the island, the Brahminy Blind snake, is an invasive species from India, and if you see one under a rock or buried in your mulch, you'll likely think it's a worm, not a snake. Again, absolutely harmless to humans, although they love to eat termites.
Colorful scarlet snakes (which mimic coral snakes, but are themselves harmless) have also been found here on rare occasion, and ribbon, garter, and brown snakes may also be occasionally encountered. And we've all heard about the infamous Burmese Pythons that have gotten a foothold (so to speak) in South Florida, but have been a lot rarer since the record cold temperatures in 2010.
A new group on the island, Eco Marco, is trying to collect data on snake sightings. If you see a snake (alive or dead) that you can identify or describe, you can let us know at our website (http://sites.google.com/site/
If you choose to live in Florida, you're choosing a natural paradise, and a sensible responsibility that goes along with the privilege of living here is knowing a bit about your non-human neighbors, including snakes. Learn about them and you won't be afraid of them, and you certainly won't kill them. You might even find them, as more and more people do, fascinating and even beautiful.
In spite of their sullied reputation, they're not enemies to be destroyed, but friends to be respected and protected.
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