When a Snake Fell From the Sky

Eight billion people inhabit planet Earth.

Thirty million live in Texas. Residents of the town of Silsbee, just west of the Louisiana state line, number roughly 7,000. Let’s estimate, for the sake of argument, that on any given Tuesday evening, 20 of those Silsbee residents are out cutting their grass. Out of all those 20 mowers and 7,000 Silsbee—residents and 30 million Texans and 8 billion humans, only one that we know of, 65-year-old Peggy Jones, was unlucky enough to have a living, writhing snake fall out of the sky and on to her. 

The story only gets weirder.

Peggy and her husband, Wendell Jones, were tending a property they own just outside the Silsbee city limits, on 25 July 2023. Wendell was out front, weed-eating , while Peggy drove a tractor (Kubota, 26 horsepower) pulling a mowing machine around the big piece of open land out back. They’d waited till evening to do the work, avoiding the nearly 100-degree temperatures of the afternoon.

Out of sight and earshot of Wendell, Peggy was lost in thought, hands on the wheel, when suddenly a 31/2-to-4-foot snake dropped out of the clear blue sky onto her right forearm.

This is not something one expects to happen. “At that particular moment, I don’t know if I realized it was a snake,” Peggy says. “You’re out here, there’s grasshoppers and little flying bugs, so you automatically just kind of sling it off. Just an automatic reaction. And that’s exactly what I did.”

But this creature did not sling. It clung, having immediately coiled itself tightly around her arm. A millisecond later, when she realized that the creature on her arm was a snake—and a big one—she shrieked, and flailed more wildly.

She had no idea what kind of snake the heavens had favoured her with, nor did she much care to know. “To me,” she says, “a snake is a snake.”

The story is just getting going, but let’s pause here to settle a couple of questions. First, why would a snake fall out of the sky? Two main reasons, according to Vincent Cobb, a snake expert from Middle Tennessee State University: Sometimes snakes lose their footing (as it were) and tumble from trees onto unfortunate passersby, and sometimes they’re dropped by a hawk that had been meaning to eat them. In this case, there was no tree, which implicates the hawk.

But, second question: If a snake falls from the sky onto an outstretched forearm, would it really wrap itself around the arm, just that fast, or wouldn’t it kind of slide off and slither away through the grass?

“The snake could very likely have hit the arm and then fallen to the ground,” Cobb says. “But I’m not surprised it wrapped around her arm, because that’s a safety response. Snakes don’t have legs and arms. It landed on something. The only way it can hang on is to wrap around it.”

So we continue with the story, having established that Peggy Jones was doubly unlucky: She’d been directly beneath a clumsy hawk, and the snake that hit her was blessed with superior reflexes, fixing itself instantaneously to her arm—not like a constrictor aiming to crush its prey, but like a beast with no intention to leave, squeezing just hard enough to bruise. No amount of flailing could rid her of the reptile, which now began striking at her face.

If that’s not sufficiently appalling, allow Peggy to make it even worse: “Take your hand and hold it at arm’s length and look at it,” she says. “That’s about the size of your hand. But now put your hand up to your face. It looks huge, right? To me, this snake looked like a super huge monster coming at me.”

Leaning and straining her head, neck and shoulder as far away from her right arm as possible, Peggy screamed for Wendell. After a few seconds, she realized he wasn’t coming. She was alone in this battle. So she appealed to the only being that could conceivably be of aid: “Help me, Jesus!” she yelled.

Cobb emphasizes that in striking repeatedly at Peggy, the snake was not just being mean. It was terrified. “It just got through being attacked by a hawk,” he says. “It falls on her arm and wraps itself around, just trying to hang on to what it fell onto. And then it sees this woman’s face two feet from it. The snake sees this as another predator. That’s why the snake is striking at her face. It wasn’t attacking her; it was defending itself.”

With the tractor still rolling, the mower still cutting, Peggy still screaming and flinging, and Wendell still blissfully weed-eating out front, Peggy’s consciousness was abruptly invaded by yet another burst of sensory input too bizarre to register: Now a hawk was there on her arm, clutching at the snake with its razored talons, furiously beating its wings around and above her head in a thunderous flapping thrum. Her heart nearly beat through her sternum.

To make sense of this startling development, let’s now learn a little about hawks. Why would one drop a snake from the sky? And would a hawk really brave a noisy tractor and shrieking human to go back for its lost prey?

Kevin McGowan, a biologist at the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University, says it’s not that uncommon for a hawk to drop a snake. “It’s hard to be a hawk,” he explains. “They have to learn how to catch stuff and kill it without getting hurt and letting it get away. And that’s not easy to do.”

Rural folklore holds that hawks kill snakes by deliberately dropping them from on high, sometimes aiming specifically for barbed wire fences. Not likely, says McGowan. When snatched up by a hawk, unless they’ve been instantly dispatched, snakes might wrap around the bird’s feet, a wing, its body.

“If the snake is wriggling and trying to fight back,” he says, “the hawk could lose its grip while it’s flying along.”

Cobb concurs: “The hawk has to drop it or maybe go down with the snake.”

Indeed, both experts are aware of cases in which hawks have been done in by their serpentine prey. So OK, the hawk drops the snake accidentally, or perhaps out of sheer self-preservation. But would a hawk really plunge down to retrieve its prey from a human astride a chugging tractor with a clattering mower behind?

“It strikes me as pretty weird,” McGowan says. “This is an extraordinarily unusual occurrence. Most hawks are scared of people. This one should have been but apparently wasn’t.”

But he has a theory that might explain this unusually bold behavior. “It’s conceivable this is a young bird, hatched this year and still trying to figure out how to do things,” he says. This hawk hadn’t learned the classic life lesson about just letting some things go.

“I mean, if it’s a big snake, it’s a big hunk of meat and you hate to lose it,” McGowan says. “So the hawk certainly would have the urge to retrieve it.”

Quick tally of Peggy Jones’s abysmally bad luck thus far in the story: Hawks don’t usually drop their prey, but this one did, managing to hit her with it. Snakes don’t always catch themselves and wrap around the thing they landed on, but this one did. And to cap it off, not all hawks are feckless juveniles just learning their trade and thus foolish enough to come back for their fumbled prey … but this one seems to have been.

We continue. The hawk seized the snake and pulled with such power that Peggy could feel it lift her arm forcefully skyward.

“I felt a good tug,” she says. “But that’s when you could feel that that snake was holding on tight.” Before Peggy could react, the hawk flew off empty-handed (as it were).

Not surprising, says Cobb. “Snakes are quite muscular, and those coils are hard to break.”

For the briefest moment, Peggy was left alone again with an even more beleaguered snake as the tractor zigzagged crazily up toward the mobile homes the couple rent out. But as quickly as the hawk had disappeared, it reappeared, again beating the air about Peggy’s head, again clutching and slashing at her arm with its talons.

Again the hawk failed and departed. A moment later, another pass, another vicious grabbing, another failure.

Oh, my Lord. Please help me. Something’s got to give here, Peggy thought.

And something did give—the snake, weakened from constant attacks by the hawk’s talons. On its fourth sortie, the bird of prey managed to yank the snake off Peggy’s arm and abscond with its meal.

Peggy was now snake- and hawk-free, but she was still not mollified. Looking at her bloodied forearm, all she could think was This is not good. Her flesh had been brutally torn, bruised and punctured. She stopped the tractor, reeling with adrenaline.

Wendell, who had just finished out front, was there beside her now, having heard her screams, and was begging to know what was wrong. She tried to tell him but was so upset that her words were unintelligible.Wendell loaded his injured wife into their truck and raced toward the hospital. During the drive, he got her calmed enough that he could begin to understand what she was saying. It sounded like she said that “a snake fell out of the air …”

“A snake?” he said. “A snake did all that to your arm?”

“No,” she answered, frustrated. “The hawk did that to me.”

She managed to convey the broadest outlines of what happened. But then a new realization hit her: She was having trouble seeing out of her right eye.

“OK,” Wendell said. “We’re almost there. We’re almost there.”

At the emergency room entrance, he helped her out of the vehicle. “Oh,” he said. “There’s something on your glasses. That’s why you can’t see.” He removed the glasses and the cloudiness that had blocked her vision vanished. 

The ER workers cleaned her wounds and carefully inspected her skin for snakebites, miraculously finding none, and wiped from the right lens of her eyeglasses a milky, yellowish fluid.

“There was venom on my glasses,” Peggy says. “And there was a little chip in them. They weren’t chipped before this.” With no sign of having been bitten, she was bandaged, put on a course of antibiotics and released.

Three questions remain: Was that really venom on her glasses? What kind of snake was it? And what kind of hawk? Definitive answers to these three are impossible to come by.

The fluid from the lens was never tested. At the hospital, all those assembled assumed it was venom because a snake had been involved. Vincent Cobb acknowledges that venom is yellowy and viscous, as described, but for this to have been venom and for Peggy not to have been bitten would be so freakishly unlikely that his gut tells him it was some other substance, perhaps mouth secretions from the snake.

“Then again,” he concedes, “it could have been venom.” After all, what other parts of this story aren’t freakishly unlikely?

Regarding the snake’s ID, all Peggy Jones can tell you is that the creature was dark in colour and long. (She and Wendell figured out it measured between 3.5 feet and 4 feet by wrapping a tape measure twice around her forearm and extending it back to her face.)

On that scant information, Cobb says, the specimen of interest could be any of six to eight species, including the pine, speckled king, prairie king, Texas rat, coachwhip and southern black racer. If the snake was indeed venomous, adds Cobb, that probably narrows it to the timber rattlesnake or perhaps the cottonmouth.

McGowan is closer to confident about the species of hawk. “Sometimes we say ‘It’s a red-tailed until proven otherwise,’ ” he says, noting that red-tailed hawks are the most often observed species, hunting in the open and perching on poles and fences. But it could also have been a red-shouldered hawk. Far less likely, yet possible, McGowan says, would be a Swainson’s hawk. 

It’s taken longer for Peggy’s psyche to heal than her arm. The encounter still haunts her. For months after the incident, she scarcely slept. Every time she closed her eyes, she would relive the terrifying ordeal—fangs, feathers, talons. But too tough to be defeated by nightmares, she has returned to working outdoors.

She’s made but one change in response to the nasty tricks Mother Nature played on her that day. In August, she and Wendell went out and bought her a spanking new zero-turn lawn mower.

“It has a canopy that covers the whole entire thing,” Peggy says. “We shopped canopy first and mower second. I got the biggest top that there is.”

The canopy is built of aluminum tread plate. Peggy made a sign for it, visible from above: a red circle with a line through it crossing out a wriggling reptile, and featuring two simple words: NO SNAKES.