Smelling snakes

  I grew up hearing sentences like this: 

Grandmother smelled a rattlesnake by the henhouse, so she got a hoe and killed it.

 

I have never smelled a snake. The assumption was that my nose was defective. No one ever suggested that the odor of a rattlesnake was too faint to be detected by a human with a normal sense of smell.

Whether rattlesnakes smell is a question that still interests me. But Roy Bedichek, who couldn’t smell rattlesnakes either, went beyond that obvious question and got to a more complicated claim: Does the smell of a rattlesnake change with its mood?

The usual claim is that a resting rattlesnake smells like a green watermelon or a cucumber. A “mad” rattlesnake — one that’s excited enough to strike — smells like a wet dog.

Though dubious, Bedichek thought the first part of that claim made sense. Rattlesnakes are ambush hunters. If a mouse got a whiff of an odor that resembled the smell of a gourd, it wouldn’t expect to be bushwhacked. Such a scent would a kind of camouflage.

Bedichek was investigating the claim in the 1950s. He didn’t find a satisfactory answer. But he did find a researcher at UCLA who was doing electrocardiographs on rattlesnakes.

The researcher, Dr. Raymond B. Cowles, was measuring the heartrates of snakes exposed to the smells of skunks and king snakes, both of which eat rattlers. Heartrates jumped, as you’d expect. If a sensitive instrument can detect one physiological change when an animal is stressed, it’s reasonable to check to see if there are others.

But I’m afraid that science is progressing slowly in the area of indicators of rattlesnake moods. I haven’t found an answer to Bedichek’s question.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960. The essay “’A Various Language’” is Chapter 10, pp. 128-35. I think it’s a model of Bedichek’s writing — an example of the kind of thinking done by people who are interested in the natural world and consider themselves a part of it. I wish an anthologist would discover it.

Stumped by sycamores

 Roy Bedichek tells of going on a walk through a grove of sycamores. He started looking for a word to describe the odor.

Dictionaries failed. He checked the poets, but they don’t help either.

 

Indeed, there seems to be no way of imparting to the unfamiliar nose a hint of what it is like to inhale in early morning or at nightfall this damp, woodsy odour. 

 

Knowing a smell is a bit like knowing a color. It’s something you’ve experienced or you haven’t. If you don’t know what red is, a description isn’t going to help.

I don’t know what gave Bedichek the idea of writing The Sense of Smell, but I suspect it had something to do with that morning walk through a grove of sycamores.

I do know what that is like: experiencing some natural wonder and then finding myself at the limits of language — and thus thought.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960, p. 17.

Being smelled out

 Theophrastus, the ancient biologist, suggested that our noses are above our mouths so that they can be used to test food before we eat it.

It seems like such an obvious principle I tend to forget the rest of the story. As Roy Bedichek said, nature has done a lot of experimenting. The olfactory organs of many insects are in their antennae. The “noses” of ticks — they are called Haller’s organs — are in their feet.

I was thinking of Bedichek’s observation because the ticks are out.

And although I know that my theory that all ticks lurk in blackberry vines when the berries are ripe is an example of observer bias, I found ticks on blackberry vines almost immediately.

When a large animal such as a man with an interest in natural history is near, the tick on the blackberry vine extends her forelegs and waves them. The Haller’s organs are in the forelegs, and the tick is combing the air for compounds such as pheromones and carbon dioxide that will allow her to find her host.

It’s the equivalent of a dog putting its nose to the wind.

It’s hard for me to imagine. Like Theophrastus’s thinking, mine is conditioned by my sensory system, which favors sight and hearing over smell. It’s hard for me to understand forms of life in which smell — or what we think of as smell — comes first.

• Sources: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960.

Meredith Swett Walker, “An Up-Close Look at the Tiny Sensory Pits That Ticks Use to Smell”; Entomology Today,” Jan. 16, 2018. It’s here:
http://entomologytoday.org/2018/01/16/up-close-look-tiny-sensory-pits-ticks-use-smell/

The budget alternative

 The ancient Greeks consulted oracles. The famous ones, such as those at Delphi and Dodona, were expensive. In addition to the cost of the trip, the seeker had to provide gifts for the staff and sacrificial animals for the gods.

The budget oracle — if you could get there — was at Mallus in Cilicia, now in southeastern Turkey.

Its founders were said to be two legendary friends, Mopsus and Amphilochus, Greeks who fought in the Trojan War. They founded the city together and ruled it together. When they had a falling out, they killed each other in a duel. As the smoke rose from the funeral pyres, their ghosts reconciled, and to celebrate they agreed to found an oracle together.

If you were an ancient seeker, you came to the temple and wrote your question on a wax tablet. You spent the night in the temple and told your dream to one of the seers on staff. Cost: two coppers.

• Source and note: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, p. 346.

An osprey at work

 We watched an osprey fishing over Alexander Lake Sunday afternoon.

I once spent a morning in Scotland doing nothing but watching ospreys catch salmon in Loch Fyne. When we lived in Galveston, I’d go to the West End and watch ospreys in the marshes.

Ospreys have a reversible toe that allows them to clamp down with two toes on either side of a fish.

Pandion haliaetus is smaller than an eagle and bigger than a red-tail hawk. If you’re wondering what you’re looking at, the giveaway is the way the osprey holds its wings in flight — a peculiar M shape. (If you were a kid flapping your arms to imitate an osprey, you would have to bend them at the elbows.)

A cool front came through the Piedmont Sunday — the temperature was only 67 at noon — and this bird was flying into a light wind from the northeast. It hovered like a harrier, and I was hoping to see a dive. But then it plodded on. Even superb fishermen don’t always catch fish.

The Locrian girls

 Greek mythology and history are full of weird stuff. The story of the Locrian girls might be the weirdest.

When Troy fell, Princess Cassandra ran to the temple of Athene to take refuge. A Locrian ruler dragged her from the sanctuary as she clutched the statue of the goddess. This villain was known as Lesser Ajax to distinguish him from Greater Ajax, a tragic hero in The Iliad.

Greek gods and goddesses were worse than cartel bosses, and Lesser Ajax came to a bad end. But Athene was not satisfied and went after his friends, family and countrymen. She struck Lesser Ajax’s hometown with plagues and famine.

The local authorities consulted the oracle at Delphi. And so each year for a thousand years, two Locrian girls were smuggled into Troy to serve as servants in Athene’s temple. Troy was rebuilt, and the new Trojans didn’t want Locrians in their territory. The new Trojans made it clear that the girls and their guides and Locrians in general would be killed if caught trespassing.

Borders were porous in those days, and girls were safe in the sanctuary of the temple. They usually served their terms and were smuggled out when replacements arrived.

The Locrians reasoned — more than once — that the curse might have been lifted. But every time they stopped sending girls to the temple, something bad happened.

The story is all the weirder because it ended around 264 BCE, in historical times. At least some people thought this strange practiced ended about a thousand years after the Trojan War.

• Source and note: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 338 and 344.

A crop report

 It’s peculiar how symbols tend to fossilize.

Georgia is the Peach State. But The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported these figures for crops produced by Georgia farmers in 2025:

• Peaches: 62 million pounds.

• Blueberries: 116 million pounds.

When it comes to peach production, Georgia is No. 3, behind California and South Carolina. The license plate on my pickup truck still has a peach on it.

• Source: Olivia Wakim, “Blueberries taking bigger bite of business in Peach State,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, May 10, 2026.