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.