I skinned a garter snake with my son when he was six. We found it flattened on the road near our house and brought it home. He loved snakes, and we wanted to preserve what was left of this creature to honor its life. We carefully stretched the gray skin and mounted it on a piece of driftwood to display its pattern of three cream-colored lateral stripes punctuated with red spots.
Recently, I went searching for that snake skin in preparation for a summer solstice gathering in a damp, grassy draw below my house. I wanted to place it at a small altar I had built for the celebration to represent the symbology of shedding and renewal. I scoured my son’s room with no luck, so I gave up and went for a walk—and nearly stepped on a dead garter snake, encrusted with guts and gravel bits. I thanked it, carried it home with a stick, and placed it on the altar atop a moose antler. The next evening during the solstice gathering, a friend wandered over to the altar—and two garter snakes slithered out from a hole in the ground under the moose antler, as if on cue.
Over the next three days, I watched two garter snakes coiled together in the sunshine on a bare mound of soil near the moose antler. The larger one had the same cream-colored stripes as the snake my son and I had skinned all those years ago, but faint black spots instead of red ones. It also had blue eyes! The other was smaller and a nearly uniform dark gray. It occured to me that maybe they weren’t garter snakes at all. If not, who were they and what were they doing together?
As it turns out, we have three species of garter snakes in Montana: common garter snakes, the red-spotted ones; plains garter snakes, who display red or orange racing stripes down their spines; and terrestrial garter snakes, who can lack the colorful markings of the other two and vary widely in shades of gray. The snake couple I saw were the terrestrial species, Thamnophis elegans.
Terrestrial garter snakes mate in spring or summer, wrapping their elongated bodies around and through each other in intricate loose knots. Females are larger than males to accommodate holding fertilized eggs until they give birth to up to 20 live young. Although I witnessed no active movement to indicate mating, the fact that they were two different sizes and coiled together for three days seems to suggest it.
And those blue eyes? It means that the snake is about to shed its skin. Garter snakes shed every six weeks or so in the first two years as they grow and then a few times a year in adulthood. A milky fluid forms, separating the old skin from the new, causing the skin and eyes to appear blue. Females are often ripe to mate when they are “in blue.”
Part of me wants to explain the snake in the road and the snakes under the altar with facts. Yes, it was the season of snakes emerging, so of course I would find a dead one on the road that day, and yes, it was the season of snake mating and we just happened to be in the right place to see it. Another part of me feels there is magic there that makes me wonder: why did snakes—live, dead, and about to shed—reveal themselves on those particular days? Perhaps the truth is both factual and magical.
Mary Oliver writes, “Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.”
I choose to be dazzled.
Today’s Field Note was written by Ashley Martens in the Field Notes Writing Workshop at the Montana Natural History Center. I’m Allison De Jong for Field Notes, brought to you by the Montana Natural History Center, providing natural history education for schools and the public throughout Montana. To find out about upcoming events and programs at the Center, call 406.327.0405, or visit our website at MontanaNaturalist.org.