What to Record When You Find a Snake in the Wild

Stop, and stay where you are. Most bites happen to people who approach, handle or try to move a snake, and a snake you have not identified is treated as venomous until a qualified person says otherwise. Two metres is a working minimum for anything under a metre long; more for large vipers, cobras and anything you cannot see the whole of. Leave the animal an escape route and do not stand between it and cover. Do not handle snakes because an app suggested a name; an identification on a phone screen is not a reason to pick anything up.

AnimalDex is educational. It is not a safety authority, and no identification tool replaces a regional guide and local advice on which species are dangerous where you are.

Everything below can be done from where you stopped, in about a minute, before the snake moves.

• 1. Photograph first

  Several frames from your current distance, then a longer-lens or zoomed frame of the head. Do not approach for a better angle until you know what it is.

• 2. Time and temperature

  Read the clock and the thermometer or forecast. Note sun or shade on the animal. These two numbers are the core of any snake record.

• 3. Where exactly it was

  Substrate (rock, tarmac, leaf litter, under a board), microhabitat (south-facing bank, pond margin), and what it was doing: basking, crossing, hunting, in shed.

• 4. Length and condition

  Estimate length against something in frame. Note cloudy eyes (about to shed), injuries, or a swollen midsection (recent meal).

• 5. Behaviour on your approach

  Froze, fled, flattened its head, hissed, rattled or shook its tail, struck. All of this helps identification and tells the next person what to expect.

• 6. Leave

  Back away the way you came. Do not follow it to cover, and do not lift the cover it went under.

One frame with the deciding feature beats twenty of the whole animal. For most lookalike pairs that feature is the head: pupil shape (vertical in vipers and many nocturnal snakes, round in most colubrids), a facial pit between eye and nostril on pit vipers, the pattern on the crown and neck, and the colour of the snout on banded species. A side-on head shot at a long focal length, taken from a safe distance, is usually enough. Then a frame of the whole body for pattern and a rough length, and a frame of the tail for a rattle or button.

Shoot with the lens you have, not by getting closer. A phone at 3x from two metres gives a usable head frame on anything over half a metre. If the snake is partly hidden, photograph what is visible and accept a genus-level record; that is better than the photo you would get by moving the vegetation.

Red-sided Garter Snake

Write down the feature that decided the name, not just the name. “Round pupil, dark eye stripe, plain brown, no collar: smooth snake” is a record someone can check; “smooth snake” is an opinion. If the deciding feature is not in the photo, record the group and the features you did see. A plain brown snake that fled into bracken is “snake, plain brown, about 50 cm, round pupil not confirmed” and that is a complete and honest entry.

Lookalikes are where the danger is. Harmless snakes flatten their heads into a triangle when threatened, so head shape is unreliable; some vipers are black with no zigzag; juvenile rat snakes carry blotches that read as a different species. Check the regional guide and, where it is available, the community: a snake identification group with regional experts will correct a wrong call within hours. Bring the correction back into your own record.

A still or short clip, an honest identity or group, a historical place with a precision, whether the animal was wild, and the time and temperature. That is enough to keep the find in a Dex and enough for a recording scheme to use. Everything else in the checklist makes the record better; nothing else is required.

Herping field journal

The place in a snake record is where the animal was when you photographed it, at the precision you are sure of. A live capture made in the app records that at the time. For an older photo, reconstruct the place from the trip and a map and say how precise the reconstruction is; a candidate without a confirmed historical location stays out of an Instagram import rather than being pinned to today's GPS. Keep the precise site in your own journal and publish only the coarse place, because snakes are collected and killed when locations become known. The record is for you and for the scheme that maps the species; it is not a treasure map.

One frame with the deciding feature beats twenty of the whole animal.