Some houses will not have this book on the table, and it is the photographs that decide it, not the text. Nic Bishop shot it, and the pictures show red-sided garter snakes in numbers, in knots, in heaps, coming out of the ground in a Manitoba spring after a winter spent underground. Look at the pictures before you buy it. That is the whole caution and I would rather put it in the first paragraph than bury it.
Dr. Robert Mason has been working on this gathering for well over fifteen years. Tens of thousands of snakes, one place, every spring. He wants to know what starts it and what the snakes are telling each other, and the answer he got is not the one anybody expected.
The science it actually teaches
A snake's tongue is not a weapon and it is not for tasting the way yours is. The forked tip collects molecules out of the air and hands them to a sense organ in the roof of the mouth. The fork matters: two tips, two samples, and a direction. Your child now knows what a flicking tongue is doing, permanently, and will never see it as menace again.
Winter is the second thing. These snakes spend months below the frost line with almost nothing running. No food. A body slowed nearly to a stop. Then the ground warms and they come out in numbers, males first, waiting.
Then the part that makes it a real book. When a female comes out, dozens of males find her and pile on, and they are not doing it by sight. She carries a chemical on her skin. Mason and his group did not settle that by watching harder. They took skin chemicals into a lab, separated them, and tested which ones a male would follow. The answer came out of an instrument. That is worth a child seeing, because a lot of children think field biology is a person with binoculars and infinite patience, and half of it is chemistry done indoors on a bench.
And the finding nobody was after: some males give off the female scent themselves, and other males court them. Once you know that, the obvious next question is what those males get out of it, and warmth is one candidate. Dozens of bodies on a cold morning is a real advantage.
One more thing, and it is the reason this book matters more than a book about something rare. This is a garter snake. It is the snake under the woodpile in most of North America. The most spectacular snake gathering on the planet is an ordinary species that nobody thought was interesting.
The child it lands with
Two children, and they are not the same child.
The one who already loves snakes will read this in a sitting and then narrate it at you for a week.
The other one is the reluctant reader. This is a short book with big photographs and a strange fact on nearly every page, and it can be finished. A child who has not finished a nonfiction book in a year can finish this one, and that matters more than the subject.
There are no snakes in Alaska, where I live, which turns out to be the best reason to own it here rather than a reason to skip it. A child who will never meet one is free to just find it interesting.
One place to stop and talk
Go back to the males that carry the female scent.
What is a scientist supposed to do with a result that was not the question he asked? That is the actual moment. Most children think science is a person setting out to prove a thing and then proving it. What happened here is that the data said something odd, and the odd thing became the next fifteen years of work.
What to know going in
The photographs are the thing to check. If anybody in your house has a genuine snake phobia, and plenty of adults do, do not hand this over as a surprise. Open it yourself first. There are full page pictures of many snakes together, and no amount of good writing gets past that reaction.
Mating is described directly and without embarrassment, because it is the subject of the research. Dozens of males compete for one female and the book says so plainly. It is clinical, not lurid, and your child will ask a question. Have an answer ready rather than improvising it at bedtime.
Snakes are handled all through this, by researchers who know what they are doing. Say the rule out loud once: nobody picks up a snake they cannot identify, no matter how many times they have read this book.
Where to get it
$11.99 at The Snake Scientist, which is real money for a book this short until you count the photographs, and the photographs are why it works. It is also the oldest title in this series that we shelve, so the science in it is settled rather than current, and that is fine for what it is doing. Buy it for a child who needs a nonfiction win, and buy something longer off the Stealth Science shelf for the child who already reads.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Emi and the Rhino Scientist: How One Calf Happened
Emi and the Rhino Scientist by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Who Was Charles Darwin? Twenty Years of Evidence
Who Was Charles Darwin? by Deborah Hopkinson
Grade 3 to 6
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
