Species Spotlight: Rough Green Snake!
Opheodrys aestivus is one of two species in the genus and the more southerly, ranging from southern New Jersey to the Florida Keys, and west to northeastern Missouri and Kansas down to the Trans Pecos region of Texas and parts of northeast Mexico. Throughout its massive range, its habitat is similar: shrubby tangles of vegetation and low trees especially along riparian corridors, where there is an abundance of food. They are one of the relatively few insect-eating snakes, enjoying snacking on caterpillars, crickets and grasshoppers, and other small invertebrates.
Entirely nonvenomous and harmless, these snakes live up to their name with mildly keeled scales and brilliantly grassy to lime green dorsal scales that transition to golden and then cream or white on the belly (which also makes them easy to spot at night, when they light up like a beacon in a headlamp as they sleep coiled in high branches). They max out at around 3 feet long, though as slender as they are they often don’t look very large even at that size. Nor is their defensive posturing particularly scary to us: they never bite, but will sometimes gape their mouths like they’re threatening to and flail about when picked up. Luckily for them, that defense is not often needed as their color makes them perfect matches to their environment. Turn your glance away for a second and that thin green body vanishes into even relatively sparse grasses or thin leaves.
Because of their diet however, this snake is heavily threatened by us. Their populations often nosedive near agricultural areas where pesticides both decimate their food supply (because it doesn’t just kill target insects) and can work their way up the food chain into the snakes themselves, poisoning them indirectly. More holistic methods and, more importantly, wide sweeps of intact habitat are needed to keep them common as they should be.

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