Serpents

An Eastern Rat Snake sunbathing on the gravel driveway

In spite of their questionable reputation, snakes are a pretty amiable lot. Tales from the Garden of Eden, Harry Potter, and one particular plane would lead you to believe that they are aggressive, dangerous, and generally malevolent, but nothing could be further from the truth.  They are our friends.

Or so I tell myself every time I come across one in the veritable Noah’s Ark of snakes that is Willow Greens Farm.

As a point of fact, the Commonwealth of Virginia plays host to 32 different varieties of snakes.  Three of these are venomous (Timber Rattler, Copperhead, Water Moccasin), with the remaining being relatively harmless.  Some of the non-venomous bite when provoked (but have no teeth), others always slither away regardless of how much you insult them.  Some are as small as a worm, some are as long as your average NBA player.  Some prefer to live in the underbrush, but some (and this point is important) choose to live in your house, uninvited and somewhat defiant.

The first inkling of the magnitude of our problem (opportunity?) came during our home inspection.  We stood outside while a diligent man promised to crawl through every inch of the house to look for leaks, code violations, and hot electrical wires.  One space remained unexplored.

“Come down here for a minute”, he said from the top of the cellar stairs.

We slunk through the underground cave, through the excavations of several centuries, while he stopped and looked up at what we thought might be a few errant stockings hanging from the pipes.  They were snakeskins.  Dozens of them.  He shot his eyes toward a crawl space.

“I’m not going in there” he explained with a shudder, “I’m just not.”

We all shared a nervous laugh and and decided that “Remove snakeskins from basement” was the extent of our demands to the current owners.  Problem solved.  How they must have laughed.

A brightly colored youngster gives us the stink-eye

We didn’t give it much thought until moving day and Laura, dissatisfied with my system of just heaving boxes at the wall and mincing out of the dark, scary place as quickly as possible, roped me into establishing some order.  While she bravely stood by the boiler, we heard a made-for-a-horror-movie sound like the basilisk scene in The Chamber of Secrets.  Six inches above her head, wrapped around the warm pipes sprouting from the heating system, was one of the largest snakes I’ve ever seen.  It would be hard to estimate length, but it was as thick as my wrist.

This was my finest hour.  Instead of running upstairs screaming, leaving Laura to fend for herself (the bookies’ odds-on favorite), I summoned a steely gaze and commanded “Just look into my eyes, grab my hands, and take two steps forward”. At first, so stunned by this uncharacteristic display of manliness, she threatened to hesitate, but in the end she got over her shock and complied.

Nothing to see here, just a seven-foot snakeskin (Mattock for scale)

The most surprising thing about this incident was how quickly we included the new housekeeping arrangement in our day-to-day life (made easier by the fact that they never came into our living space). Conversations with other owners of historic houses confirmed that the presence of these Eastern Rat Snakes was a given—one even lured them into their living room with frozen mice—and that your reaction to snakes in your home was a litmus test of your suitability as “country person”.  One look at the gawd-awful Nextdoor app confirmed that you had to choose a tribe.  You were either an “Eww a snake, burn the house down” person, or a bona-fide son of the soil.  We had made our choice.

Plus, we learned of the many benefits of hosting Eastern Rat Snakes.  Their diet consists mainly of mice, of which we have plenty.  These guys also scare away copperheads, the only venomous snake we have in our area.  And in many ways they are just cool, stretching themselves on the warm stone walls of the house in the early spring.

Having just shed her skin, this lady takes a turn round the woodshed

On a mission to make the farmhouse welcoming to our friends, we’ve had to go about correcting the sins of the past: removing the previous owners’ half-assed attempts to discourage visitors via poisons and mothballs (illegal), and removing the particularly cruel waddings of bird netting shoved in every crevice designed to trap snakes as they entered.

We’ll keep this newsletter posted with any sightings as spring approaches, and we do that with anticipation rather than dread.  So this is my Valentine to snakes, may they live long and prosper at Willow Greens Farm.  As long as they don’t go after my chipmunks.