Florida pine snake hunting in the long days

The sandhills of Bay County sit under full summer sun for the longest days of the year. The sand is pale and loose underfoot, the longleaf pines throw short shadows at midday, and somewhere beneath the surface, in the tunnels that pocket gophers have excavated through the sandy soil, a Florida pine snake is moving. You may not see it. These are secretive animals, and this habitat — open sandy upland, scattered wiregrass, the occasional pixie cup lichen crusting the ground between clumps of sandhill laurel — looks quiet even when it isn't.

The Florida pine snake is one of the largest snakes in North America, and one of the least seen. Adults regularly reach five feet; some stretch past six. They are heavy-bodied and pale, patterned in brown blotches that lighten toward the tail, and they move through this landscape with a deliberateness that has nothing to do with slowness. They are active hunters, and summer is when that hunting is most urgent. Females are gravid or have recently laid eggs, tucked into deep sandy burrows where the temperature stays stable. Males are ranging widely, covering ground in search of mates and food. The long days give them more time above ground, and the sandy upland gives them what they need: loose substrate they can push through, pocket gopher colonies to raid, and enough open ground to move without obstruction.

Pocket gophers are the center of the Florida pine snake's diet. The snake enters burrow systems directly, following tunnels that gophers have dug for entirely different purposes, and kills prey underground where nothing can interfere. It is a constrictor, and in the confined space of a burrow, that matters — the snake presses prey against the tunnel wall rather than coiling freely around it. Young pine snakes eat lizards and small rodents; adults shift almost entirely to gophers. This is a relationship with a specific geography. Where there are no gophers, pine snake populations tend to collapse. And pocket gopher colonies require exactly the kind of open, sandy, fire-maintained habitat that has been disappearing from the Florida Panhandle for decades. Development fragments these uplands into patches too small or too isolated for a snake that may travel a mile or more between burrow sites. The Persian silk tree, an invasive species now present in this area, is one marker of that pressure — it establishes readily on disturbed sandy soils and shades out the open ground that both gophers and pine snakes depend on.

The pine snake has one defense that is disproportionate to its actual danger. When threatened, it flattens its head, hisses loudly through a modified glottis that amplifies the sound, and vibrates its tail against dry leaves. The effect is startling. It works well enough that many pine snakes are killed by people who mistake them for rattlesnakes. This is a significant source of mortality for a species that is already listed as threatened in Florida, that matures slowly, and that produces only one clutch of eggs per year. A broad-headed skink flicking through the palmetto nearby poses no such confusion, but the pine snake's size and defensive display carry a cost in a landscape where people are present.

The common coachwhip also hunts these sandhills, moving fast and visually, scanning from slightly elevated ground. It is a different strategy entirely: speed and acute vision rather than the pine snake's methodical subsurface searching. Both snakes are present here, and both are necessary to a system that has been losing its large reptiles steadily as the habitat patches shrink. The brown thrasher scratching through leaf litter at the edge of the scrub, the eastern towhee working the understory, the Carolina wren calling from somewhere low and dense — these are the sounds of a functioning upland, and the pine snake moves through all of it, mostly invisible, mostly underground, present in ways that are easy to miss.

If you are standing in open sandy scrub right now, look at the ground. Not for the snake itself, but for the loose, slightly mounded soil that marks a pocket gopher's push. That disturbance is the feature this whole relationship turns on. The sun is high and the sand is warm to the touch.