Field Notes—

The Sun Unfurls Ribbons For Spring

By Curtiss Clark

The sun’s path keeps rising toward its assignation with the summer solstice next month, and while some new-mown lawns in shady vales got a final frosty goodbye kiss from winter last Friday morning, things are really beginning to heat up.

On an early evening walk last week, I spotted three yellow ribbons curled up by a rock. Something deep in my brain gave me a start as the ribbons coalesced in a blink from bare impression to fully conscious perception. They were the trademark stripes of a garter snake, huddling his cold-blooded self in the rock’s radiant heat.

When the garter snakes emerge in spring, you know the earth has shifted its weight toward the sun.

When we see them, and whether we see them, depends a lot on the sun. As heterothermic (cold-blooded) animals, snakes depend on the environment to regulate body temperature. When they get cold, they lie in the sun. When they get hot, they lie in the shade.

Warm-blooded mammals like us are homeothermic and depend on food and the energy it produces to regulate our body temperature. We can use well over half the calories we consume at breakfast just to keep our temperature constant at 98.6 degrees until lunchtime. Those who keep snakes as pets know that some species can go a month or so between meals when they have to.

For us, it’s food, food, food. For snakes, it’s location, location, location.

So for four months out of the year here in New England, when the sun doesn’t cooperate with living things trying to keep warm, snakes disappear. But where do they go? Florida? St Barts?

Because it’s been such a cool May so far, the garter snake I saw the other day was probably still within commuting distance of his winter hibernaculum, where he spent the frigid months with scores, even hundreds, of his closest friends. They look like solitary souls when we come across them in the warmer months, but garter snakes depend entirely on their community for survival when it gets cold. When the sun forsakes them, they turn to each other, huddling in a protected den sharing body heat.

The thought of spending the cold, dark winter months lying in a pile of snakes in a hidden hole trying to eke out enough BTUs to survive is my idea of a nightmare. Consorting with snakes under any circumstances is a nightmare for many people. I have already warned my mother not to read this column. Her fear of snakes (known formally as ophidiophobia) is so acute that she cannot see a picture of a snake or even hear the word “snake” without having a visceral shudder overtake her for several moments. She is not alone.

The fear of snakes is one of the most common phobias, and it’s not just about that first serpentine betrayal in the Garden of Eden. There appears to be something primal in our automatic response to snakes. I felt it in myself when the garter snake by the rock startled me. My negative reaction was almost preconscious. Have we evolved to view snakes with alarm?

Sigmund Freud had some ideas about this, and he cited Charles Darwin, who knew a thing or two about evolution: “Most of us have a sense of repulsion if we meet with a snake. Snake phobia, we might say, is a universal human characteristic; and Darwin has described most impressively how he could not avoid feeling fear of a snake that struck at him, even though he was protected by a thick sheet of glass.”

This observation by Freud, made in 1917, that the fear of snakes is a basic human characteristic, has been borne out by modern research. In 2001, a Swedish researcher reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General that the subjects in his study were consistently faster at identifying pictures of snakes than of other more benign objects (mushrooms and flowers). Subjects who had previously expressed a fear of snakes in interviews were faster still.

Because snakes have been a threat to mammals in general and humans in particular throughout our evolution, the researcher theorized that our brains are now hardwired to react with fear and flight. Evolution, evidently, was a cruel, hard path to the present, and those with the best defenses led the way.

I know garter snakes are harmless, however. They don’t behave badly if you leave them alone, which I don’t find hard to do thanks those ancient impulses embedded in my brain stem. But those ribbons sure are beautiful.

Considering what the garter snake has to go through to warm up to spring, I suppose it’s worth a little effort on my part to overcome my human nature and warm up to him.