I learned a valuable lesson back on June 9th. My spouse, Laurajean, was busy playing Everquest, while I was downstairs, turning over a couch (the reason I was doing such a thing will be expounded upon in the future). After moving the couch, I spied what I thought was a piece of string or debris on the floor. I reached down to pick it up and it wiggled.

Now, I’m pretty used to finding odd bugs, the occasional mouse, moths, etc, in the house. But this was the first time I had ever found an actual snake in the house. It was about 4-5 inches long, a baby. When one is confronted with this situation, there are many paths one can take. However, being married limits you somewhat in appropriate steps you should take. Below are three choices. One is the wrong choice:

1. Kill the creature and dispose of the body.
2. Quickly transport the creature to a place far, far away, as quickly as possible. If you have a method of opening any sort of hyper-spacial dimensional gate to a parallel world, that would be even better.
3. Capture the creature and place it in a Tupperware container, rush with it upstairs and announce to your spouse, “Honey, you’ll never guess what I found downstairs!”

Had I done either #1 or #2, well, I wouldn’t need to be writing this, obviously. Laurajean is good with other life-forms: she doesn’t mind picking up frogs or turtles and doesn’t mind spiders too much. But snakes were just too much for her. She freaked out.

So, I had made mistake number 1. Unfortunately, I am male, so I’m genetically predisposed to make further mistakes while attempting damage control.

Laurajean: “Kill it, take it away, out of the house, I don’t care. I want it gone.”
Me: “Aw, honey, it’s just a baby snake.”
Laurajean: “Baby? You mean there may be more? And a mother? Aieee!”
Me: “Uh.”
Laurajean: “You need to search the house and make sure there are no more.”

Now, here’s the thing. Her request, on the surface, seems reasonable; however, I quickly realized that it wouldn’t matter if I searched the house or not, because I would still spend the night watching Laurajean so that no baby snakes killed her in her sleep. So I did a cursory search and found no more snakes.

Then I did what any normal person would do: I started using Google to find out what kind of snake I had found (to make sure, mainly, that it wasn’t poisonous). Luckily, New Jersey has a nice Endangered and Nongame Species Program web site, with PDF files with images for identifying various snakes, turtles, reptiles. Their online field guide was invaluable. It took me a little while, but I identified our visitor as a Southern Ringneck Snake, a basic snake that eats worms, slugs, frogs and the like.

I took some pictures, too. My wife made me take the little guy somewhere far away for release, which I did. I figured we probably have a few more around the house, anyhow (outside, I hope, for my sake).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Science/Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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