Otto: A snake can provide a screamin’ good time

Or you could drive just a little farther down Campton Hills Road and visit the Hickory Knolls Natural Area.

Granted, most days it’s pretty quiet there; in fact, its peace and serenity are part of its charm. But this past Tuesday things were a little different, at least for a few seconds. That’s when our coworker Joan Kramer found a critter she’s all too accustomed to seeing: a snake.

“I screamed,” Joan said, recalling the incident that brought her within a few feet of the one critter she’d like to avoid. She was behind our maintenance garage looking for, ironically, rattlesnake fern, when the scaly beast appeared, then quickly disappeared into the tall grass.

While snakes per se are fairly common at Hickory Knolls, 99 percent of what we see there are garter snakes. Joan herself had another memorable encounter last summer with a large garter inside that same garage. But this week’s snake was no garter.

“It was HUGE,” Joan said. She held up her fist to show the snake’s girth, and stretched her arms to show its impressive length. She added that this snake was black with spots, not black with stripes like last year’s garter.

Hmm. Intriguing indeed! In Illinois we don’t have very many snakes that grow larger than three or four feet. We also don’t have that many that are both large and black. About the only species that matches both those criteria is a snake that is really uncommon here in Kane County: the black rat snake, Elaphe obsoleta obsoleta.

Now if you travel downstate, out east, or south to Missouri or the Carolinas, black rats are pretty much everywhere. My friend Josh tells the story of a black rat who used to try and grab hummingbirds that came to the feeder outside his Carbondale home. And the author Barbara Kingsolver referenced the snake, though not favorably, in her novel “Prodigal Summer”.