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How to Save a Life By Robert Winkler June 11, 2007 Crow Hill Preserve (Easton) to Trout Brook Valley (Weston)
I assumed the thrush was defending a fledgling in the area. I was so focused on her I didn’t immediately see what was upsetting her, though it was right in front of me. Minutes elapsed before I relaxed my view, when I was shocked to behold a huge black rat snake, motionless and halfway up the tree. Three quarters of the snake curved around the trunk, tail closest to the ground, while the head and neck lay on a horizontal branch about eight feet above my head. If the snake had been climbing, my arrival may have made it pause. I got the impression it was aiming to go higher, though I suppose it could have been resting or had undertaken an ascent too challenging to complete. But where was it going? I saw no nest, just a leafy clump on the next horizontal branch above the snake’s head, about six feet away from the trunk and maybe 20 feet off the ground. I expected that putting my binoculars on the object would confirm this casual observation, but raising them to my eyes I made another startling discovery. I saw the head and bill of a fledgling wood thrush poking from the top of what was indeed a nest. The fledgling faced the trunk, in the direction of its mother, who was still hopping in the branches around the snake. Unaware of the silent monster poised directly below, the baby wood thrush patiently waited to be fed, expecting its mother to hop toward it on that branch at any moment. Instead, a short time after I had passed, the snake would continue its torturously slow progress toward the bright-eyed, trusting victim, who was too young to leave the nest. Even if the fledgling could see the snake, I doubt it would recognize the danger. I could see the fledgling because I viewed the nest from the side, at a favorable angle, yet there were probably siblings hidden from my eyes, since the typical wood thrush clutch consists of three or four eggs. The adult wood thrush, which I’m guessing was a “she,” placed herself in great jeopardy to defend her brood. She repeatedly dove at the snake, snapping her bill. I held my breath as she hopped around, bupping, inches from the snake’s head. Her recognition of the threat presented by the snake was uncanny. This must be more than instinct. She knew the snake’s intentions. This comes from tragic experience. I felt the snake was capable of striking out and seizing her, that he (another guess) was showing no reaction to lure her closer, patiently waiting for hysteria to deliver her into his clutches. (How easy it is to impart diabolical motives to a snake!) I deliberated for only a moment. At least while I was there, nature wasn’t going to take its course. I couldn’t just walk away. I came along to find a snake threatening one of my favorite birds—no, the defenseless baby of one of my favorite birds. I wanted to help the wood thrush. The snake was very big, but I’m bigger. Bad timing for the snake. I picked up a long stick and tried to get the tip under the loop between the snake’s head and neck (on the horizontal branch) and the rest of his body (on the vertical trunk). My great fear: driving him higher. Somehow I slipped the stick between his scales and the bark, pulling upward to separate his head from the horizontal branch. To my great relief he started down the trunk, but reaching the next horizontal branch, he headed out on it. That branch was about seven feet above the ground. I couldn’t get him to move back toward the trunk, so I decided to let him continue out on the branch. When he reached the end, I would use the stick to pull him off and to support him as I brought him to the ground. The snake had other ideas. He held his tail tight around the base of the branch, near the trunk—I could feel his constrictive power through the stick. I worried that he would turn around and head back up the trunk, which would quickly put him beyond the reach of my stick, forcing me to watch helplessly as he devoured the fledgling. So I persisted in trying to uncoil that tail. Finally he let go and moved farther out on the branch, which lowered under his weight. He was slow and expressionless but I think confused; though he showed no fear, I think he felt the need to escape. He seemed to have trouble negotiating the branch the farther out he got, so I took the opportunity to pull him completely away, hoping I could keep the stick under him to break his fall, or that he would choose to coil around it as I brought him down. Despite my good intentions he fell clear of the stick, but because he was weighing down the branch, he dropped little more than three feet onto thick leaf litter. On the ground, he seemed fine as he started winding away. While getting the snake out of the tree, I lost track of the wood thrush. Had she watched, and if so, was it with a sense of relief? Such complacency probably isn’t in her nature. With one danger down, you have the opportunity and the responsibility to look for others. As I herded the snake away, the wood thrush and her mate materialized, together diving at a streamside grackle, who retreated after one thrush emitted a loud, screeching whistle. I didn’t appreciate the snake’s length until he was slithering away: at least six feet—maybe not the thickest black rat snake I’d ever seen, but certainly the longest and the most aggressive. He was reluctant to move, sliding for a few yards while I followed with the stick to drive him away from the nest, then stopping. When I brandished the stick to bring out his flight response, he coiled up and faced me.
Slowly I leveled the tip at his head, and after a pause, during which he repeatedly flicked out his tongue, he struck at the stick with a hiss, opening his jaws wide. This happened three times as I herded him toward a shallow stream. He swam skillfully across a pool, crossed a muddy patch, and disappeared beneath a rotting log fallen across the stream. He entered a loosely enclosed space formed by the log, raised slightly above the water by rocks in the stream, and leaves washed up against the log’s other side. I probed his escape hatch to no avail. He had vanished, confounding my plan to put hundreds of feet between him and the wood thrushes. After he got wet I had noticed white flecks on his body that formed faint, broken bands in roughly the shape of hourglasses. His whitish belly had been obvious while he climbed. Only 60 feet away from the nest tree when I last saw him, he might be able to find his way back. Aside from puzzling over his mysterious disappearance, I wondered how he had known that the tree contained a nest with at least one young bird. Could he sense the heat of the fledglings with his flicking tongue, or taste scent molecules falling from the nest to the ground? Had he noticed activity between the fledglings and the parents? That he could summon such powers while prowling the ground from a distance seems incredible—almost supernatural. How could any immobile, young, small creature evade this veritable science fiction monster—a heat-seeking, motion detecting, voracious killing machine? Could the snake have chosen the tree simply because it was climbable, or because experience had taught him to associate the species and girth of the tree with food? These last two possibilities seem so random—very inefficient mechanisms for survival—but maybe the snake’s low metabolism and infrequent need for prey give him time to wait for happenstance as he crawls and climbs through his neighborhood. Eventually, he will run into something, or something will run into him. From the prey’s point of view, the inevitability of such a meeting is very scary. In asserting my dominance over a formidable fellow predator, I felt a kind of power I had never experienced. Although I didn’t hurt the snake and never considered doing so, I knew how King Kong felt when he dispatched a huge serpent that had sneaked up on Fay Wray. Having proved my position at the top of the food chain just like Kong had, as a protector rather than as a hungry hunter, I had the primal urge to pound my chest like a gorilla, to roar like a lion. I was in a class with the grizzly, tiger, crocodile, shark, and anaconda. I had shown the world who’s boss, and I reveled in it. This newfound power put extra spring in my step on the way back to the trailhead. Reaching Crow Hill, I heard wood thrushes, whose songs I took as praise for my good deed. I realize I may have merely postponed the snake, though I hope long enough for the fledglings to develop the ability to recognize danger and bail out of the nest. The fledgling I saw needed only a couple of days to reach this stage.
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