We recently attended our friend Mark’s high school graduation party. As we were talking, the first thing he said to me was “Remember the weekend we went snake hunting at your house? It was one of the early influences on my interest in snakes and Herpetology.“

I remembered the weekend well, although I was a bit surprised he did. It was in July of 2008 and he was just shy of six years old. His folks, Steve and Jessica, offered us the opportunity to have Mark stay with us for the weekend, and we readily agreed. We picked him up on a Friday morning and he stayed with us until Sunday afternoon.

That weekend was great all around. Not having children, I’m always amazed at kid’s capacity for life and willingness to try different things. With Mark, we went fishing and cooked the fish we caught for dinner. Cathy took him on a horseback ride. He drove our tractor. We did a hike to a “haunted house” looking for ghosts. We also just goofed off and floated around in the pond. They were all wonderful summer activities.

One accidental activity was “snake hunting”. On Saturday, as we were walking from the house to the barn, we spied a snakeskin in our sawdust pile (the sawdust is used as bedding for the horses). I mentioned to Mark “Maybe the snake is still around and we should see if we can find it.” He readily agreed. In actuality, the snakeskin was dried out, so I assumed the snake was long gone and we were safe. We retrieved a couple of rakes and started raking through the sawdust. I’ll be damned if we didn’t find another snakeskin. Mark’s eye’s lit up and we resumed raking, but more slowly. Then, we hit pay dirt. No, not a snake, but snake eggs* buried in the sawdust!

Holy hell, this WAS cool. We looked at the eggs awhile, took some pictures, and then covered them back up with sawdust. We continued our search, but never did find any live snakes.

We had more adventures that night and the next day, and then met up for pizza with Steve and Jess Sunday afternoon to return Mark. I think both he and we were a little sad the weekend was over.

Mark’s interest in nature and animals had started before the visit to our small farm, and continued afterwards. He watched Steve Irwin’s wildlife TV show regularly. Although Irwin had died in 2006, when stabbed in the heart by a stingray, his TV show lived on in syndication. Mark remained fascinated by animals, reptiles and snakes. Steve and Jess joined Friends Of the National Zoo (FONZ). As Jess remembers, they spent a lot of time in the reptile house. Mark also loved the books about animals and snakes at school. Later, he joined the Boy Scouts, and went on to become an Eagle Scout.

Life goes on and time accelerates. Suddenly, your five year old visitor is an eighteen year old man, graduating from High School…

At the party last week, Mark told me “I’ve always been interested in animals and snakes, but the weekend at your farm was the first encounter with them ‘in the wild’, and not at the zoo or in a book.” He has continued to search out snakes in their natural habitat. He’s developed his own equipment for handling snakes, should he want or need a closer look.

This summer, Mark will work at a Boy Scout camp near Goshen, VA. While there, he will help with a study on the Pine Snake (of course). He also let me know that starting this fall, he will major in Wildlife Conservation at GMU, and has already been selected to attend the Smithsonian Mason School of Conservation as a part of his studies. It’s a highly selective program that takes place at the Smithsonian Museum’s Campus in nearby Front Royal, Va. He’ll also take courses in Herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians. Down the road? Mark would like to spend some post graduate time studying the Variable Bush Viper, or the Spiny Bush Viper, both venomous snakes in Africa.

It’s not always easy to see or understand the effects of simple actions from your life. Sometimes it takes a decade or longer for them to surface. I think this might be the case with our friend Mark. I don’t know the exact role his visit to our farm played in his interest in snakes and Herpetology, but it appears it may have contributed. The ripples of the actions in our lives never cease to amaze me. Such small events can have such large effects. Would things have turned out different for Mark if we’d never seen that snakeskin? Probably not … but I guess we’ll never know.

Cathy and I both wish Mark well in his studies, and hope he’s able to follow his dreams in the future. Maybe, just maybe, it will involve snakes.

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Addendum:

⁃ *I’ve since learned that Copperheads and Rattlesnakes lay live snakes, not eggs. The eggs we saw were possibly blacksnake or rat snake eggs. It turns out many snakes love to lay their eggs in old wood piles, decayed wood, or SAWDUST if available.

⁃ Yes, I took a flip of the Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones’ comment “Why’d it have to be snakes!?” For the title to this blog.

⁃ Thanks to Mark Stoops and Dorothy Schwetz for the use of some of the photos in this blog.

– Thanks as always to my friend Colleen Conroy for her editing assistance. She has a great way of suggesting corrections, without making me feel like an English illiterate. 😉

⁃ Interesting to note that the weekend with Mark in 2008 was 4 years before my own incident with a Copperhead. You can read more about that here: https://mnhallblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/copperhead-hunting-in-flip-flops/