A physician called to tell me he has a patient who said he was bitten by a snake with brightly colored rings that he killed, but he has no bite marks. The doctor wants to know if I will identify the snake.

When I got to the emergency room, I was shown the smashed snake. It is our poisonous Texas coral snake. I told the doctor and patient that coral snakes rarely bite in self-defense and if they do, they chew skin because they don’t have large fangs like a copperhead or a rattlesnake.

Texas coral snakes (left) are poisonous, but milk snakes (right) are not.
Cameron Park Zoo photo

They defend themselves by striking with a raised, coiled tail that mimics their head, and crawl backward.

Yes, we have poisonous eastern coral snakes in Central Texas and also harmless milk snakes that mimic them with similar coloration. For identification, remember their respective body ring sequences — red and yellow together kill a fellow, red and black good for Jack.

By experimenting with snake models presented to captive-born javelinas and coatis in a zoo, I learned that these native snake eaters instinctively avoid my coral snake models, but readily bite and chew brown snake models.

My neighbors called to say they have a snake in the house. Can I come and get it?

I was ushered into the kitchen and directed to a cabinet at floor level.

I opened the door and in a large bowl, I found a quietly coiled, 30-inch-long, harmless western rat snake (chicken snake), which I extracted, as the family watched through a doorway.

I bagged the snake, remarked on its importance as a rat-eater and assured them I’d release it elsewhere and I did — at my house.

Eastern hognose snakes will puff up and hiss when disturbed.
Fred Gehlbach photo

Copperheads are local woodland snakes. They are not aggressive but will bite if you touch or step on them. Harmless eastern hognose snakes look similar, according to my neighbors, though I totally disagree.

But they puff up and hiss when disturbed, which can be frightening. Sadly, they are usually whacked.

The snake that interests me the most is the small (less than 10 inches), slim, silvery pink, worm-like Texas blind snake. Its head is indistinct, with pinpoint eyes beneath scales. That’s because of its unusual ecological niche that my biologist colleague, Julian Watkins, our Baylor students and I discovered.

In fact, its instructive life induced the British Broadcasting Company to send two TV photographers to Waco to film blind snake behavior and the unique blind snake-screech owl connection.

Blind snakes live underground in ant and termite colonies. They eat these insects’ eggs and protect themselves from ant and termite soldier attacks by periodically smearing repellent fluid over their bodies.

Eastern screech owls occasionally catch blind snakes, which are so slick in the owls’ beak and feet that they are seldom injured or killed. These captives are scraped off into the owls’ tree-cavity nests to feed their nestlings and burrow in the loose rotting wood mixed with nestling poop, food remains and dead animals, also put in the nest cavity as food for nestling owls.

Broad-banded copperheads are not aggressive, but they will bite if provoked.
Fred Gehlbach photo

The dead bodies attract flies that lay eggs on them, and they and the hatching fly larvae feed blind snakes, which saves the bodies for nestlings to eat.

Such blind snakes inadvertently benefit nestling owls without being adversely affected. It’s called commensalism and I learned that owl fledging success at nests with live-in blind snakes is increased compared to nests lacking the live snakes.

Of course, food deliveries cease when the nestling owls fledge. Then, one to three blind snake boarders per nest crawl out of the cavity and back to life in the ground.