By Tim Homan
I have stepped or stopped dangerously close to only two poisonous snakes, both copperheads, while walking on or near a Southern Appalachian Trail. All of the other times I have encountered pit vipers on or beside a footpath, I have been lucky enough to spot them well within the margin of safety, at least 8 or more feet ahead. A thick timber rattler coiled and buzzing atop warm treadway rock commands sudden stop as good as an armed guard. But the fortunate thing is, once spotted from a comfortable distance, a venomous snake is no more dangerous than a bullet still in the box.
Even though I have been within biting range of two potentially dangerous snakes, I have had only one close call. The first encounter occurred near the end of Raven Cliffs Trail. [1] I left the worn route and walked up the rocky slope to identify a sapling tree. As I was reaching out to examine a large leaf (cucumbertree, a member of the Magnolia family), I heard a whispering rustle on the forest floor uncomfortably close to my feet. I looked down and saw a copperhead about 18 inches away and steadily slithering right to left toward the toe of my lead foot. I froze, stood tombstone still. The pit viper showed no sign it had seen or sensed me, so I held my position as the typical-sized mature copperhead (about 30 inches long) crawled perpendicular to the toe of my left boot. The reptile's tail might have brushed the thick leather of my boot before the cold-blooded creature continued its own errand downslope toward the trail and Dodd Creek.
And that was it. The snake never exhibited the slightest alarm or awareness of my presence. My boot was just another obstacle that defined its path of least resistance. I never felt like I was in danger: no fear, no adrenaline, no drama; just a keen alertness and a pinpointing of focus on the incoming copperhead and my left foot.
My one and only close call to date occurred while I was walking and wheeling Section 1 of the Chattooga River Trail. [2] I started hiking from the US 76 Trailhead next to the river on a sun-bright, mid-July morning in 2001. The pale blue sky-small cotton-ball clouds scattered high overhead, no breeze below the forest canopy-promised high-pressure-system heat. After 6 hot and humid miles of teasing glimpses down to the glinting water, the footpath closely paralleled the Chattooga for the first time. By then I was sweat soaked and long past ready to feel the officially wild and scenic river wrap its cold water around my overheated body.
Searching for the right pool, one deep and green, I failed to conduct my customary quick reconnaissance of the track ahead: the usually automatic, low-level radar scans watching out for the four Rs-rocks, roots, ruts, and rattlers. About midway through the flat riverside stretch, I glanced down just as the measuring wheel in my left hand was going to roll over a copperhead half a foot in front of its tail tip. My next stride, trailing right leg already lifting off the sandy tread, was going to land squarely on the snake somewhere behind its triangular head.
Adrenaline's instant cavalry, saddled up and sabers drawn, catapulted me up and off to the right of the route, over and away from the pit viper. I landed at an angle almost beyond recovery. I tried to power out of the imminent fall with fast choppy strides like a sprinter coming out of the blocks. I started to level off, had a chance to remain upright before I ricocheted off a small hardwood and lost my balance again. I pitched forward, my hands and arms breaking an impending face plant. I lay in the low vegetation, wind knocked out of me, down for the ten count, a TKO. My mind took inventory of moving parts and pain. Everything was okay except for a small divot in my right palm and pain in the meat of my right shoulder where I had smacked into a young post oak. I sat up and examined my shoulder-red scrape marks, a trickle of blood, a big bruise on the way. I stopped the bleeding in my palm and rinsed it out with canteen water.
After rounding up my gear, I turned toward the sunning snake, still in the exact same position: sprawled diagonally across the sandy footpath, head closer to the river and to my right as I had approached it with the wheel. Drawing two parallel horizontal lines to represent the trail, the serpent laid like a more slanted forward slash-tail northeast, head southwest. I moved closer to the nearly 3-foot-long ophidian. No reaction. I jigged the end of my hiking stick a foot in front of its hidden hypodermic-needle fangs, folded out of the way when not in use. Again, nothing. The basking reptile was sacked out in a deep, open-eyed sleep. The copperhead's siesta-slack body had settled into a pronounced slump. The top of its back ridged to a slight crest; its long belly sagged and bowed out at the bottom like a car tire twenty pounds low.
Now certain the snake was zonked out, I inched closer for a better look. I squatted down so that my boots were a safe and sensible 3 feet away [3] from its head and started writing notes. The pit viper, a forward lean and arm's reach away, was as motionless as a stuffed museum specimen. It looked like a short thick rope of powerful muscle made long ago by an earlier god without much ambition. No fur, no feathers, no skin as we know it, the reptile's legless length-stuck in evolution's crawl stage-looked utterly ancient and alien.
The disparities between us, day hiking human and stolid nerve-fired rope, represented the deep geological time of eons and eras. Time enough for continental plates to play bumper cars across the Earth, time enough for mountain ranges to rise and to erode to half their height since the age of reptilian origin.
The snake's triangular head was blunt where an arrowhead is pointed; the hinged end of its jaws bulged out like it had the mumps. The copperhead's precisely lapped scales, small interlocking shields, encased its sinuous body in form-fitting armor from lip to tail tip. Its primeval eyes were locked wide open beneath a pair of clear scales: watchful windows to a fixed and frozen stare, a kind of early contact lens. Those bright and seemingly alert eyes-immovable, unfathomable, disconcerting-were incapable of conveying any sort of emotion or expression, not anger or joy, not wonder or surprise, not even a wink or a blink.
I could clearly see this species' distinctive pit-viper pupil: vertically elliptical, black and shiny as an obsidian gemstone set in its brownish-orange iris. I could even clearly identify one of the tiny heat-sensing pits in front of and about level with the bottom of each eye.
The stationary snake's body remained fairly thick until abruptly tapering to a skinny, 4-inch-long tail. The copperhead was colored and repetitively patterned in the shades of old leaf fall, perfect camouflage for an ambush predator. The signature interlocking pattern of copper-brown, hourglass-shaped crossbands on a buff background alternated buff and copper-brown across its back. The crossbands, which paled away from their borders with the buff, narrowed across the top of the back and widened toward the sides, while the buff widened along the back and tapered toward the sides.
I thought about rousting the vulnerable reptile with a poke from my hiking stick, counting coup as payback for my oozing palm and painful shoulder. But that snake lay glossy and gracefully curved in the sun, so I let that sleeping creature lie in peace right where it was instead. After all, the fault had been all mine. The copperhead couldn't have been more obvious unless it had hoisted a skull-and-crossbones flag hiker-eye high before taking its noonday nap. The pain was penance for carelessness and a reminder to be more vigilant.
After drawing a few quick sketches and scribbling several pages of notes, I left the snoozing snake and waded into the cool green Chattooga for a short swim. I washed the blood off my upper arm and shoulder, then sat down on a bankside rock to relax and dry in the sun.
Ready to go again, I shouldered my daypack and walked back for one last look. The pit viper still lay sound asleep in the trail's light gap, ancient instincts innocent of naked ape newcomers with stout hiking sticks, trust in its deterrent absolute. I spoke to the snake with a steadily louder voice to test what I had read once again. No response.
Notes
1 The 2.5-mile-long Raven Cliffs Trail leads hikers into the approximately 9,240-acre Raven Cliffs Wilderness in the North Georgia mountains (Chattahoochee National Forest, White County).
2 The 10.7-mile-long Section 1 of the Chattooga River Trail, from US 76 to the Bartram Trail junction just beyond Sandy Ford Road, loosely follows its namesake stream in the North Georgia mountains (Chattahoochee National Forest, Rabun County). The "Section 1" designation for the CRT segment beginning at US 76 is simply my designation for hiking-guide organization and does coincide with "Floating Sections" of the Chattooga River.
3 I am much more fearful of rattlers than copperheads, and would never, ever, consider squatting down so close to a sleeping rattlesnake.
Thus far, I have not encountered a copperhead atop a high Southern Appalachian ridgecrest, and have not had the pleasure of seeing one above 2,800 feet in elevation. Judging from my long experience, Agkistrodon contortrix prefers relatively low-elevation habitats beside or fairly near streams: forested flats and lower slopes above rivers or creeks large enough to let in sunlight. All but one of the copperheads I have spotted in the Mountain South-over a baker's dozen now-have been slithering or sunning within 100 yards of a stream. The lone exception was coiled between Claude Stewart's long legs on a hardwood slope no more than 200 feet of elevation above the Chattooga River. But even that copperhead was only a short toboggan ride away from riparian habitat.
I wrote "stuck in evolution's crawl stage" in my notebook before further study taught me that legless locomotion was evolution's design for additional reptilian diversity.
We sometimes draw evolutionary history as a stick-figure family tree. The rising main trunk, the ascending branches, and the branches forking away from branches depict the progression from the simplest organisms to the most complex, all the way up this tree of being to humans at the lonely tip-top. Viewing evolution from our apex vantage point, we would naturally assume that lizards evolved from snakes, the simpler and more primitive looking organism begetting the more outwardly complex one. But our assumption would be wrong. Evolution doubled back on itself. Snakes are the newer, sleeker, more streamlined model. The belly-crawling snake evolved from the ambulatory lizard.
Snakes evolved in a way we can scarcely conceive of: backtracking away from legs. This radical reconfiguration of reptile was no accident or aberration; blind evolution slowly lopped the legs off some lizards. Evolution applied its twin pillars of change and adaptation -- genetic probe and genetic test, random mutation and natural selection -- to pluck the legs off randomly selected lizards.
Pit vipers belong to the Viperidae family, which also includes the cottonmouth and all of the rattlesnakes. All pit vipers are equipped with small pits located between their eyes and nostrils. Heat-sensitive organs inside those pits enable Viperidae species to detect and locate warm-blooded prey at night. Those heat-sensing organs are sensitive enough to find and pinpoint the heat signature of a mammal as small as a mouse in complete darkness, quite a sophisticated internal technology.
Snakes sun themselves for at least three reasons. The most obvious and well-known reason is thermo-regulation: warming up and coming back to life with a cupful of solar coffee. Sunning also speeds up the digestive process and aids in the internal incubation for those species that bear live young such as the copperhead.
The generic term cold blooded does not apply to one of the most important adaptations of reptilian physiology. In scientific and more accurate parlance, snakes are ectotherms. They do not generate heat internally to maintain body temperature; they use solar heat to raise their body temperature when necessary. The copperhead I almost stepped on, the one sacked out under the full glare of the summer sun, could have been as warm blooded as any feathered falcon or hairy mammal marmot at the time. The snake was warm, but it didn't have to burn calories to provide the heat. Compared to endothermic mammalian predators, snakes and other reptiles have a very slight predatory footprint.
"Ectotherms have low metabolic rates and thus generally require only about one-tenth the food needed by a similar-sized mammal."
"Large adult diamondbacks (eastern diamondback rattlesnakes), which feed primarily on large prey such as cottontail rabbits, may consume only four or five meals each year."
Thanks to Whit Gibbons for verifying and explaining various snake facts. The last two quoted sentences were borrowed from the book Snakes Of The Southeast written by Whit Gibbons and Mike Dorcas.
