No Ordinary Black Snake

Read part one HERE. 

The black snake lay stretched across the pavement, slinking in the direction of the woods.  Had we been a minute later, we would have missed it completely.  Carl slammed on the brakes and we both leapt from our seats.  I raced around the passenger side, my view of the snake obscured by the truck’s hood.

When I heard Carl make the ID, my heart stopped.  “Hog-nosed!” he shouted from the opposite side of the vehicle.  I skidded to a halt.  “Oh my goodness,” I stammered in stunned elation.  This was too good to be true; was I dreaming?  First green salamanders and now my long sought-after lifer eastern hog-nosed snake!  I had wanted to see a hog-nosed ever since I first read about them nearly ten years ago in my reptiles of Ohio field guide.  During my teenage years, posters depicting Ohio’s native snakes decorated my bedroom walls.  The hog-nosed, with its peculiar upturned snout, always drew my eye and captured my imagination.  I never believed I would actually get to see one.

The hog-nosed snake (Heterodon platirhinos) was a sight to behold—three feet long, jet black, and hissing.  Her head was flattened out in the hog-nosed’s characteristic, cobra-esque defense display.  As we inched closer she reared up, showing us the broad side of her neck and seething with deep, rattling sibilations.  The snake's mouth was elongated into a wide grin; with those unblinking eyes, her expression had the intensity of a madman.  As we got closer, the snake’s apparent rage only increased.  We needed to move the furious serpent off the road; other cars would soon be upon us.

To the reader, if you have never heard of the hog-nosed snake you might be quite surprised at what comes next.  Gingerly, I picked up the pseudo-cobra.  She continued to hiss furiously, but never attempted to strike.  Hog-nosed snakes are all bluff.  They put on a show to scare off would-be predators by appearing big, confident, and dangerous.  Hog-noseds are in fact completely harmless.  They are toad hunters, with fangs in the rear of the mouth used to pop the inflated bodies of their warty prey.  These fangs contain a mild amphibian toxin, but this poses no real threat to humans.  

For a hog-nosed to envenomate you, it must first bite (which they are not typically inclined to do—unless you smell like a toad).  Hog-nosed snakes may strike when encountered; this is usually a feint.  If the snake were to make contact, its nose would just glance off your body, mouth clamped tightly shut.  If the snake does somehow bite (this is only likely during an accidental feeding response from a captive snake), the recipient would have to allow the snake to hang on and chew.  Chewing slowly works the back fangs and mild venom into the wound.  Most people who are envenomated allowed the snake to chew because they thought “it was cute.”  Even if all this comes to fruition, the bite shouldn't be any worse than a bee sting (though like a bee sting, some people may have an allergic reaction—making a bite more serious).  

As I held the rapidly contracting and expanding body of the hissing hog, a pickup pulled up beside us.  Two county sheriffs looked out at me and my apparent cobra with stunned curiosity. "That's no ordinary black snake," one of them observed.  His tone was somewhere between horror and reverence.  We explained to them that the snake wasn't dangerous and that we were moving it off the road so it wouldn't be hit.  They seemed intrigued by this bizarre and apparently ferocious creature living in their woods that they had never seen or heard of before.  They drove off likely thinking, “Those guys are crazy.”

We placed the hognosed at the edge of the road for a few more photos.  When we heard the engine of another car approaching, I grabbed the snake again.  This time, I squeezed her tail just a bit too hard—a fact I would soon come to regret.  A shudder ran through the snake’s body. Suddenly, the hog began to thrash about violently as though it had been shot.  Epileptic seizures gripped the hog-nosed for several seconds.  Finally, its bowels discharged and the snake hung limp.  “So much for photographs,” Carl said with disappointment.

Hog-nosed snakes play dead when feeling threatened.

Surprised?  This is the second act in the hog-nosed snake’s playbook.  If pretending to be big and bad isn't sufficient to scare the threat away, the hog-nosed will play dead.  This two-part performance has earned hog-noseds the affectionate title of “the drama queens of the snake world.”  Hog-nosed snakes take playing dead to a whole new level.  After her Shakespearean death scene, our hog rolled onto her back, gaped, and let her tongue hang out.  Defecating on herself helped to give that final stinky touch.  Who would want to eat a dead snake that had been laying in the sun all day?  

There is one famous flaw to the hog-nosed snake’s death act.  I gently flipped the ‘dead’ snake onto her stomach, hoping to snap her out of it.  Instead of coming back to life, however, the hog just rolled over again.  There is no convincing a hog-nosed that a dead snake shouldn't be laying on its back.  I asked Carl if there was any chance we could wait out the hog’s performance to get some more pictures.  He assured me there was not. 

Carl has seen around two dozen or so hog-nosed snakes in Ohio over the years.  Sadly, about half of those have been dead on the road.  “I have no formula for finding that species,” he explained to me when I inquired about hogs during one of our first trips.  When conditions are right, they might turn up.  Just what those conditions are, however, isn't quite clear.  Warm, cloudy days seem to be good for snake movement.  Today was one such day.  On our drive down, we stopped every few miles to inspect the bodies of recently road-killed snakes.  Herps were definitely out and about.

Once, Carl had the good fortune of flipping a cover board with two hog-nosed snakes under it!  Whatever it was about that day’s conditions had brought not one, but two hog-noseds to utilize his boards.  Does the great rarity with which they are seen mean hogs are sparse in Ohio?  Not so!  Hog-nosed snakes are likely much more common than we realize.  They occur in several counties along Lake Erie as well as the hill counties of southern Ohio.  It is the hog-nosed’s fossorial nature that makes them so mysterious.  Hog-nosed snakes are most commonly found where there is sandy soil.  That upturned snout allows them to dig for toads—their main source of food.  Much of a hog-nosed’s life is subterranean, out of sight of eager herpetologists. This was only the second live hog-nosed snake Carl had driven up on in nearly 15 years of searching.  

I was honored to have seen an eastern hog-nosed snake in the wild.  Our female was a particularly large and stunning specimen.  Hog-noseds generally have a pattern of spots or blotches, with shades of peanut butter brown, tan, black, orange, and even brick red.  Our girl was completely melanistic—solid black except for a rim of white around her lips.  If we hadn't been in a hurry to get home, I would likely have spent the rest of the day with her. I released the still limp snake into the woods in the direction she had been heading.  As we drove away I expressed my disbelief at our find.  It didn't feel real.  "It'll hit you when you don't find another one for four years," Carl said knowingly.  I can only hope it won't take that long.