“Last night I watched an enormous brown watersnake eat a catfish, very cool. And made several more visits over the next month.ĭuring our frequent conversations, he remained upbeat and excited, albeit rainbow-less. Without looking at me, I heard him mutter, to himself I suspect, “This looks like good microhabitat and I will be back, tonight.” He flipped an old jon boat, waded belt-deep under a rotting dock, then lay on his belly to probe caverns beneath an undercut bank. On our field date, Schiltz’s demeanor morphed from that of an attentive listener and mild-mannered scholar to a bloodhound in pursuit of a just-escaped convict. So, shining for swimming rainbows at night is the way to go. According to the historic literature, the snake is locally referred to as “eel moccasin” because, “every time you see one, he has an eel tail hangin’ out his mouth.” Rainbows most often forage at night, spending the daylight hours ensconced in a muddy burrow at riverside or among the submerged knees of a gnarled cypress trunk. I joined Schiltz in habitat on the Altamaha River and we talked up rainbows. Nick Schiltz, originally from Wisconsin, spent much of this year studying snakes of sandhill habitats on Fort Stewart. This summer I met a talented field herpetologist who was on a crusade to find a rainbow snake in the wild. You will hear those passionate about reptiles say that finding a rainbow under natural conditions is the Holy Grail of snake hunting, a deathbed memory, the consummate fantasy for the herpetologically inclined. Rare even where common, clandestine to an extreme degree, rainbows are very seldom encountered. A stout, powerful species, males are 2-4 feet long, the larger females 4-6 feet. The rainbow, regarded as one of the most beautiful of North American snakes, is nonvenomous and never bites people. The highly aquatic, nocturnal rainbow snake, Farancia erytrogramma, is an eel-hunter par excellence. They grow, from transparent glass eels, to nightcrawler-sized elvers, to 3-foot cream-bellied monsters plump as a man’s wrist.Īnd throughout their eely lives (8-25 years), until the adults migrate back to the Sargasso Sea to breed, then die, they are haunted by the specter of a serpent - a river snake that has evolved to specialize on them as prey. In search of nursery habitats, they ascend our freshwater rivers. American eels breed here and, after hatching, their tiny larva ride ocean currents that take them into the Gulf Stream.
The Sargasso Sea, near Bermuda, is about 1,000 miles east of Savannah.
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