Sad - Killed By Mistake

By now I'm pretty sure I've killed this lovely snake. It was totally unintentional. In trying to put the pieces of the story together, I ultimately concluded that I must have gotten him/her with the weed whacker while doing yard work.

For anyone out there who may be thinking, "coral snake", this is actually the Scarlet King snake, a non-venomous pretender. It's a very small snake, about the width of those fat pencils 1st graders use and maybe 1-1.5ft long. I had seen this one before several years ago when it was on my patio playing dead. I have a much better picture taken that day posted on my youtube sight, if anyone wants to see it. When I found the snake curled up in the grass/weeds the other day, I was hoping maybe he might just be playing dead once more. Unfortunately, he was still in the same spot the following day when I took this photo, and if you look closely at the left side of the photo, you can see what looks like an injury and an ant crawling on him. There is another ant on him in the right half of the picture, not a good sign at all.

I felt SO awful to think that I may have killed him/her. I was also sad to loose this beautiful creature that was apparently living in my backyard habitat.

How did it happen you might ask? I don't know for certain, since I didn't see it happen. Like I said, I only put the pieces together later, after I found the snake lying in the grass. I had been cutting weeds with the weed whacker. This was my 1st year attempting to handle the yard work again after several years of hiring a landscaper (after my accident). Being unfamiliar with garden plants, the landscaper had made a number of mistakes over the years, but I had let them go. The one pertinent to this story was a hydrangea which had become enshrouded in some kind of vine, a horrible weed which had been allowed to grow unfettered for several years. By this time the hydrangea was dead underneath, and the vine now appeared as a shrub, having taken on the shape of its victim.

At the time, I only had the string trimmer with me, but I've learned to use that thing in all sorts of ways, so I set about using the trimmer to peel the layers of vine off of the dead hydrangea. I now believe the king snake was in there at the time, although at no time did I actually see him. I think this may have been his home. I had always thought of snakes as living in holes underground, so this was something I hadn't considered. At some point while trimming the vine back, I saw something I couldn't make sense of at all, something wet and grayish, a medium gray color. Heartbroken to think it might be a baby bird, I stopped immediately to investigate, but the thing had vanished by that time. I looked all around the area but could find no sign of the wet, gray thing.

I finished trimming the shrub and continued on around the area, trimming under other shrubs. That's when I came upon the snake in the grass as seen in the photo. He was maybe 5ft from the shrub. For some reason I knew he was likely dead even before seeing the injury, and I knew this was probably connected in some way to the strange incident of the wet, gray thing in the dead hydrangea. After a while I pieced together what seems the most likely series of events, that the snake had been in that dead shrub, had been injured by the trimmer, and had made it to this spot in his attempt to flee. The wet, gray thing I saw briefly was probably the injured snake. I gather at that moment I was looking at a cut portion of the snake, which explains why I didn't see brightly colored stripes. The area where I found him was opposite where I had been standing while trimming the shrub, so it fits the running away scenario.

Why am I telling you this? I don't know. I don't have a question. I know what type of snake it was, and I'm pretty sure he is dead. I guess I just needed to share. I really have been upset about the incident. I feel like a stupid, bumbling human ignorantly killing wildlife. It seems like a smaller version of the bulldozer wiping out habitat and killing animals with oblivion just to clear some land for human use. I feel horrible about doing this, and I feel a sense of loss as well. Not everyone, after all, has one of these beautiful snakes living in their yard, and now neither do I. It was an honor to have had him/her here, and I feel awful to think that I may have killed him. As you can tell from the frequent use of "apparent" and "seems", I'm still in denial that he/she is really gone.

About the snake's ID, the easy way to tell this snake from the coral snake is by the color bands. There is a rhyme for this. It goes:

Black, yellow, black, friend of Jack;
Yellow, black, yellow, kill a fellow.

Actually, I don't recall if the 2nd line is as shown or "yellow, red, yellow", either of which works. The bottom line is this, find the color that is on either side of another color. There will only be one such color on either snake, black for the king, yellow for the coral. Remember the rhyme, particularly the "black, friend of Jack" and "Yellow, kill a fellow" parts. When you attempt to call out the series of 3 colors with one sandwiched between another (black, yellow, black or black, red, black in the case of this snake), no matter how you do it, either black or yellow will always be on the end (outside of the 'sandwich'), and that is the key to which snake it is.

There is another rule involving the head. One, I believe it is the coral snake, has yellow at the tip of the head (mouth). I like the stripe thing better, because it doesn't require me to find/see the head of this tiny snake to make the ID.

In my photo above, the snake actually appears to be "white, black, white", but that's a distortion caused by the camera. The actual snake had yellow stripes not white.

Hmm. New news. This morning the snake is gone after having been in that one spot for some part of two days. Basically, he was there from around noon Tuesday until early morning Wednesday when I checked again. Now he's gone. This snake did this once before, lying motionless all afternoon while I was outside and then disappearing once I went inside. While I would love to think this time is like the 1st, and he just got up and left, my guess is this time it's more likely that he was the meal of a scavenger, one of the raccoons or opossums that frequent my backyard.

But since I have no way of knowing for sure, I'm going to cling to the possibility that the scarlet king snake left on his own and is still alive somewhere in my yard or in the forest behind it...

The jingle is Red against Black, Friend of Jack; Red against Yellow, Kill a Fellow. The color that is next to the red is what is important. However, even that isn't foolproof. There are venomous snakes that break the rule if they are partially albino which does happen. And there are non-venomous snakes that have red against yellow. I always treat all snakes as if they are venomous. I took some photos of a coral snake in our yard. He was a very gentle and beautiful snake and while I let him go on about his business, I used a telephoto lens to take the photos. ^_^

I know you are sad that the snake might not have made it, but don't beat yourself up too much. In spite of trying so hard to live in harmony with nature, sometimes it is just impossible and accidents happen.

Regards,
Patti

About 25 years ago I had a battered, scarred one-eyed garter snake living in my yard. I didn't want to run it through the lawn mower (it looked like it had already tried it once), so I kept relocating him further and further from my house. It kept returning like a homing pidgeon. I finally found some good water snake habitat a LONG way from my house before I saw the last of the snake. But the point is, it survived and thrived with some pretty serious injuries.

Hi P_Edens,

Thanks for your post and for adding the correct jingle. There actually are a number of different versions of that thing now, probably because people get it mixed up and pass it on in a different form. They all work though. That's what's important.

I don't handle any snakes. I give them all a wide berth. Knowing the venomous from the non-venomous just makes a difference in my BP when I run across one. :-)

Hi pollengarden,

Thanks for your story. The 2nd day when I looked for the snake he was gone. Since I have no way of knowing what really became of him (or her), I've chosen to believe he/she may have gotten well enough to leave the area and look for a new and safer home. Logically, I thought that was probably incorrect, but, lacking evidence to the contrary, it's what I've chosen to believe. Your story gives me renewed hope that my fairytale version may actually be true. Thanks for sharing your story.