04/19/2026
Good to know. I have only seen one Hognosed snake. 🐍
You stepped into your yard and I was two feet from your boot. I flattened my neck. I hissed like a steam leak. I reared up and struck at your shin with my mouth closed. You assumed I was a cobra or a rattlesnake. You went looking for a shovel.
I'm an eastern hognose snake. I've been living in the loose soil behind your shed for four years. I'm not venomous to you, I'm not aggressive, and the entire performance you just witnessed was theater.
The neck flare is copied from cobras I've never met. The hiss is louder than my body should be able to produce. The strike was a bluff — my mouth stayed shut. I did all of this because I am two feet long and you are several hundred pounds and I have no other options. The display works on raccoons and hawks. It was never meant to work on you.
If you had stayed and kept threatening me, I would have gone to the second act. I roll onto my back, open my mouth, let my tongue fall out, release a drop of blood from my nose, and emit a smell like something three days dead. I hold the pose without blinking. If you flip me right-side up, I flip myself back over — because a properly dead snake is, apparently, upside down. It is the least convincing death performance in the animal kingdom and it saves my life constantly.
🐸 Here is the part that surprises people.
I specialize in toads. My upturned snout is a shovel — I dig them out of the soil where they've buried themselves to sleep. Toads inflate their lungs to become too big to swallow, so I have enlarged rear teeth that puncture them like releasing a tire. My saliva contains a mild toxin that subdues amphibians. It does nothing to mammals. You could hold me in your hand for an hour and feel nothing.
Females lay twenty to forty eggs in sandy soil, then leave. No guarding, no return. The babies hatch fully independent, already knowing the flare, the hiss, the death-feigning routine. No one teaches them. They emerge from the egg as tiny, dramatic, perfectly rehearsed actors.
🌿 If you see me:
- Step back and let me leave — the whole display ends the moment I feel the threat is gone
- Don't kill toads with pesticide — you remove my entire food supply and I move on
- I am harmless to you, your children, and your dogs. The rear fangs are buried deep in my mouth and cannot reach anything larger than a toad
I've been behind your shed for four years eating the toads that would have otherwise overrun your vegetable bed. You didn't know I was there.
That's because I'm good at my job. 🌱
