Mississippi Green Watersnake

Somewhere on an oxbow lake in the Ouachita River valley, a fat green snake is draped across a cypress branch about three feet above the water, doing nothing. Not hunting. Not moving. Not threatening anything. Just lying there in the sun like a garden hose somebody threw over a tree limb and forgot about. A guy in a bass boat rounds the bend, sees the snake, and tells everyone at the landing that he just saw a cottonmouth the size of his arm.

He did not see a cottonmouth. He saw a Mississippi Green Watersnake — Nerodia cyclopion — and the snake could not have cared less about him, the boat, or the six-dollar crankbait he lost on a stump twenty minutes earlier. The snake wanted a fish. A small fish. Preferably a bluegill. The guy in the bass boat was not on the menu, was never on the menu, and would not have been on the menu if he had climbed out of the boat and sat down next to the tree.

A Few More Facts

Accessibility

Accessibility

The Mississippi Green Watersnake is not a vocally conspicuous animal. They do not call, sing, or produce sounds that carry across a wetland the way frogs and birds do. The splash when a basking snake drops off a branch into the water is audible at close range — a heavy, single splash distinct from the lighter splashes of turtles and the explosive flush of a startled duck — but it is not the kind of sound that announces the species from a distance. A Mississippi Green entering the water sounds like a watersnake entering the water: one authoritative splash followed by silence.

For visitors who are blind or have low vision, the species is more likely to be experienced indirectly through the ecosystem it inhabits than through the snake itself. The cypress-tupelo swamps and oxbow lakes where Mississippi Greens live are among the most acoustically rich habitats in North Louisiana — the amphibian chorus, the wading bird calls, the Barred Owls, the woodpeckers, the wind through the cypress canopy. The snake is a silent participant in a loud ecosystem.

Knowing that they are there — basking on a branch, cruising a bank, swallowing a fish — adds a layer to the experience of a cypress swamp that does not depend on seeing the animal. The swamp is the snake's habitat, and the swamp is available to every sense.

The best observation sites for Mississippi Green Watersnakes — the boardwalks and overlooks at Black Bayou Lake NWR, the accessible trails at Upper Ouachita NWR, the fishing piers and shoreline access at the state parks — are the same sites that provide the best general wildlife access in North Louisiana. A visit to any of these locations during warm-weather months puts a person in Mississippi Green Watersnake habitat whether or not the snake shows itself.