Rough Green Snakes

Photo © 2005 Jim Jung and licensors. All rights reserved.

Rough Green Snakes are about the only well-liked snake in our fauna. Probably the reason for this is their distinctive appearance - a bright, emerald-green - making for easy and certain identification. The females of these small, shy, inoffensive snakes leave their leafy bowers at this time and descend to earth to lay their eggs.

Valuable habits

Rough Green Snakes spend most of their waking lives in bushes and trees - where their coloration makes them essentially invisible - hunting caterpillars and large insects which are their chief food. As such they're an important control on damaging insect hordes that might otherwise proliferate out of control and denude the forest trees of their leaves.

Eggs and young

Female Green Snakes seek out knot holes, hollow limbs and inverted flower pots to lay their eggs. Each female lays up to twelve tough, leathery elliptical eggs and then returns to her hunting. Assuming the eggs can avoid detection by predators the little snakelings will hatch out sometime in late July or early September looking like miniature versions of their parents. Oddly, the freshly hatched snakes are blue, not green, when they emerge from the egg! This coloring quickly changes to green as the youngsters dry out.

We once had a clutch of six eggs hatch in our living room (in a closed terrarium, of course) and had to keep them for several days until we could release them. For the first day we kept the hatchlings in a clear glass wide-mouthed gallon jar where they remained in constant and frenetic motion. On the second day my wife added a small potted plant only six inches high and within minutes of its appearance every snake in the jar had disappeared into the plant where they remained motionless and effectively invisible.

In the wild the hatchlings wait until dark and then quickly disperse into nearby vegetation.

From our Archive:

• How to Hatch Reptile Eggs
• Reader's Photos of mother snake and incubating eggs.

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