Junior
camp overnight to a new place.
Every
two to three weeks junior campers were taken to the end of the wilderness trail
to spend the night; only the older cabins as I recall. Generally we marched
down the valley through senior camp and headed a few miles to camp along a creek.
This time we trucked them to a new place and settled around a small lake, on
the side of a hill, whose outflow went into a fairly large creek.
This
large creek was a) shallow, b) in full sun as it ran along the edge of a wide
open pasture and c) full of big flat stones and swarming with minnows. In
short…..Snake City.
There
were so many water snakes and so many kids that I told them to just turn over
flat rocks and callout how many snakes were there; three per rock was not
uncommon.
Flash
forward, same place different war party: ML, Bailey One (high school friend)
Bailey Two (college friend). Bailey One and I were from Oak Ridge (this place
was middle Tennessee about 30 miles west of Nashville) but Bailey Two was from
Ft. Lauderdale which turned out to be “good”.
Bailey
Two was on a visit from south Florida to see what was what in Tennessee,
snake-wise. When he first arrived he HAD to go snake hunting but I explained to
him, as it was pouring rain, that a good spot (creek through a golf course) was
out as the standard banded water snakes and queen snakes would not be on
branches hanging over the creek and sunning as there was no sun. But he HAD to
go. Turns out they were “sunning” as usual…go figure.
So
we hit this middle Tennessee snake city creek with Bailey One and I assuring
Bailey Two that water snakes were all that were going to be under the rocks. So
Bailey One and I head down stream and Bailey Two heads up stream with all
flipping rocks like mad.
Then
comes an inquiry from upstream, and I quote, “what the f..k is this?!?!” Well
the “this” was a cottonmouth and judging from its size and strong markings a
member of the western tribe.
This
was a surprise on a number of levels. First, I had been around this general
territory for years and never seen, or heard of that I believed, a cottonmouth.
I’m talking in rivers, creeks, lakes etc. Also I had explored this very spot
with an army of kids and only water snakes were found (“lucky, lucky, lucky,
lucky…..”). Most significant, surprise wise, was that Peterson’s “A Field Guide
to Reptiles and Amphibians” (edition 1, Conant & Conant, 1958) had the
western cottonmouth range ending well west of where we were.
Range
maps are a good start in identification as snakes don’t migrate far (no legs).
But there it was (around 1970). Naturally when the second edition of the field
guide (1975) came out I immediately turned to the cottonmouth range map and
sure enough the cottonmouth range had been extended east in middle Tennessee
putting them where this character had showed up.
I
never met Roger Conant but I think I saw him once sitting at a small table at a
meeting of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. As I
recall he was wearing a straw skipper and had a three ring binder on the table.
A line of people were waiting to talk to him who, I surmise, had input for his
range maps. These were surly people Conant trusted to know where they were when
they saw what. For the most important decision every person makes every day of
their life is who to believe.
ML
3
Jul, 2018
