©Chris Spohn
January 4, 2021
Saving a Snake
- as seen by -
Chris Spohn
Some of the most rewarding things about being involved with the natural world include introducing friends to creatures otherwise hidden to them and being in the right place at the right time to help save one.
As darkness fell during a recent camping trip in North Carolina, we went for a walk to look for frogs and toads. I stumbled upon the tail end of a snake caught in some landscape netting. It took a few minutes to find its head so I could get a positive identification – a northern black racer, Coluber constrictor contrictor.
I exclaimed, “We’ve got a snake to save!”
I used my camera to take a photo (above) to see how embedded the netting was on the snake. We didn’t have any cutting tools on us. We pulled up the huge tangle of plastic, snake included, and walked it back to camp.
Thirty-five minutes later, we had very carefully removed the netting around its neck and jaw, and the racer slithered away, back to its home in the wild.
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