Like our Primate cousins, humans seem to have an innate fear of snakes. While I know most of them are harmless and not poisonous, whenever I happen suddenly come upon a snake, my first reaction is always shock, until reason takes over. In the Robson Valley, we don’t have to worry about snakes. The only type of snake that lives here is the Red-sided Garter snake.
The Red-sided garter snake is harmless reptile that eats things like slugs, insects, and in water, tadpoles, leeches, and minnows. The Red-sided Garter snake is the most northern occurring snake in North America.
In the spring, I sometimes see one of these garter snakes slithering around in my greenhouse. It is only about 18 inches (45cm) in length, and always looks for a hiding place when it sees me. I think they overwinter in the crevasses in the boulders of the rock slide on the slope above our house. In the spring they migrate down to the valley bottom for the summer. I generally see one of two flattened snake corpses of these snakes who failed to get across our road during the spring.
I have only ever seen one poisonous snake in the wild. My wife and I were hiking along a over-grown jungle trail in Costa Rica, when we spotted this brown-patterned baby snake in the weeds. It was the size of a pencil and had an arrowhead shaped head. We discovered later that it was a baby Fer-de-lance, one of the most deadly snakes in the world. We were a lot more observant about where we tread after that encounter.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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