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Saving Snakes: Snakes and the Evolution of a Field Naturalist
Beautiful to behold and extremely sensitive to its environment, the snake is nonetheless stigmatized as a serpent, a creature that almost universally inspires fear. At a time when so many animals are endangered, who will speak up for the snake?
Snake populations are declining precipitously around the globe, but calls for their conservation are muted by fear and prejudice. Saving Snakes offers a new approach to understanding snakes and preserving their populations—an approach built on respect. Nicolette Cagle has traveled the world in search of snakes, from the Midwest and the southeastern United States to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Australia, and spent decades conducting natural science research on the patterns of snakes in regions where urban development encroaches upon the natural world. Her book offers a firsthand account of the strange and secretive lives of snakes, and reveals their devastating losses.
Beautifully and accessibly written, Saving Snakes entwines Cagle’s personal narrative with deep scientific and historical research. Through the author’s exploration of her evolution as a field naturalist, it provides a blueprint for developing a conservation consciousness among young people and paves the way for increased inclusivity in the male-dominated field of herpetology. While fundamentally a book about snakes, this is also the story of one woman's pursuit of her passion as she searches for, studies, and advocates for these enigmatic creatures.
Snake populations are declining precipitously around the globe, but calls for their conservation are muted by fear and prejudice. Saving Snakes offers a new approach to understanding snakes and preserving their populations—an approach built on respect. Nicolette Cagle has traveled the world in search of snakes, from the Midwest and the southeastern United States to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Australia, and spent decades conducting natural science research on the patterns of snakes in regions where urban development encroaches upon the natural world. Her book offers a firsthand account of the strange and secretive lives of snakes, and reveals their devastating losses.
Beautifully and accessibly written, Saving Snakes entwines Cagle’s personal narrative with deep scientific and historical research. Through the author’s exploration of her evolution as a field naturalist, it provides a blueprint for developing a conservation consciousness among young people and paves the way for increased inclusivity in the male-dominated field of herpetology. While fundamentally a book about snakes, this is also the story of one woman's pursuit of her passion as she searches for, studies, and advocates for these enigmatic creatures.
- GenresNature
222 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 17, 2023
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December 23, 2025
In “Saving Snakes,” Nicolette L. Cagle asks you to do something most of us have been trained, by reflex and folklore, not to do: to stay. To not flinch away from the sudden line of a body in grass, the quick muscular parentheses in leaf litter, the cold arithmetic of a head that seems to appear from nowhere. To stay long enough that fear can finish its first loud sentence and fall quiet, and something else can begin to speak.
The book opens the way many lives in science actually begin – not with a thesis statement, not with the clean white authority of expertise, but with a small patch of overlooked land and a child walking beside a parent. An acre wedged between the machinery of American movement – roads, tollways, the suburban certainty of lawns – becomes, in Cagle’s telling, a universe. A father lifts a piece of plywood. A garter snake is there, not as omen or evil, but as a fact of astonishing beauty: rough gray scales, faded gold striping, the compact legitimacy of an animal that has survived our disregard. The moment is intimate, almost domestic, yet it carries a kind of quiet terror, too – the recognition that whole worlds are hidden under what we toss aside, that the ordinary can turn, in an instant, into the uncanny.
Cagle’s great gift is that she does not use this scene as a sentimental origin myth. She treats it instead as a primer in attention. The child’s awe is allowed to remain awe, but it is braided immediately with the discipline of noticing: what kind of refuge a board provides, what kinds of prey gather in damp darkness, how small a home range can be. The book keeps returning to that braid – lyric immediacy twined with the patient, almost devotional insistence on ecology’s specifics – and it is in that braid that “Saving Snakes” earns its authority. This is not a book that tries to rescue snakes by making them cute. It does not hand them eyebrows or morals. It does not plead. It simply looks, longer than most of us are willing to look, and invites the reader to develop the stamina for that looking.
If “Saving Snakes” were only a memoir of a girl becoming a scientist, it might still be worth reading. But Cagle is after something more stringent, and more difficult: a record of what it costs to care for an animal the culture has already sentenced. Snakes arrive in our stories preloaded. They are the shape of betrayal, the shorthand for treachery, the hiss beneath the world’s first mistake. Even people who consider themselves rational can become suddenly medieval around them, their language reverting to superstition and disgust. Cagle watches this happen again and again – in the casual violence of a shovel, in the relish of a story told at someone else’s expense, in the way fear becomes a social bond – and she refuses to treat it as mere ignorance. It is, she suggests, a deeper habit: the human urge to externalize dread, to give it scales and make it crawl away so we can call ourselves clean.
What gives the book its tensile strength is that Cagle does not pretend she is exempt from the forces she describes. She is frank about the seductions of the scientific persona – the way field biology can be sold as a romance of toughness, a theater of bravado, a parade of “firsts” and “discovered” and “caught.” She remembers the “idols” who populate a young naturalist’s imagination, the larger-than-life figures whose photographs seem to say: be fearless, be singular, be the kind of person who handles danger with a grin. But “Saving Snakes” is a story of demythologizing. The deeper into her own training Cagle goes, the more she becomes suspicious of spectacle. Competence, in her account, looks less like dominance and more like restraint – like moving carefully, recording honestly, admitting what you do not know, resisting the impulse to turn an animal into proof of your own courage.
The middle of the book travels – Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Australia, Peru – yet it does not read like a tourist’s scrapbook of exotic peril. Cagle’s prose is at its best when it refuses the easy thrill of elsewhere. The tropics are not a lush backdrop for self-discovery; they are complicated, human, contested places, full of labor and local knowledge and the long shadows of economics. In Peru, in particular, the book’s ethical frame sharpens. Here the question of snakes cannot be separated from the question of bodies that are most exposed to them: workers, children, people far from clinics and antivenom, people whose vulnerability is not an aesthetic but a daily condition. Cagle does not romanticize fear in this context. She lets it stand as information. She is attentive to the uncomfortable truth that “coexistence” can be a privilege word, easy to pronounce from a safe distance.
One of the book’s most affecting through-lines is its portrait of scientific life as lived rather than imagined. Cagle writes, with unusual clarity, about the precarious scaffolding beneath the field’s romance: the unstable jobs, the temporary housing, the small indignities that accumulate until the body begins to feel like a tool that can be borrowed and returned. There is a chapter whose title, “gumby,” says almost everything about the expectation placed on early-career scientists: be flexible, bend, contort, absorb. The cost is not simply exhaustion. It is a slow erosion of self-trust, a training in swallowing discomfort until discomfort becomes the air you breathe. Here “Saving Snakes” begins to resemble other contemporary narratives of work – in academia, in publishing, in any vocation that trades on passion – where devotion is used as a solvent, dissolving the boundaries that might keep a person intact.
And yet the book does not collapse into complaint. It returns, again and again, to what snakes have taught Cagle about survival: not heroism, but fit; not conquest, but adaptation; not loud persistence, but the quiet insistence of a body doing what it was shaped to do. There is something bracing in her refusal to make a virtue of suffering, and something equally bracing in her refusal to make despair into sophistication. The book is strongest when it names institutional fatigue – the slow-motion tragedy of bureaucratic “concern,” the way conservation can become paperwork that gestures at protection while accepting loss as inevitable – without letting that fatigue become an excuse to stop caring.
The later chapters pivot toward teaching and language: the next generation, the words we use, the ways fear is inherited. Cagle is especially good on the inadequacy of facts delivered like pills. People do not hate snakes because they lack information. They hate snakes because the stories are already there, embedded in the muscle memory of culture. If there is a form of salvation in “Saving Snakes,” it is not conversion through argument; it is the slower conversion of presence. A student holds still long enough to see a snake as an animal rather than a threat. A child learns to say the name of a species without spitting it out. Someone who has always killed on sight chooses, once, not to. These changes are modest, and Cagle does not inflate them into triumph. But she insists that modesty is not the same as insignificance. It is how the world actually shifts.
The book’s style mirrors its ethics. Cagle writes with a clean, attentive lyricism that rarely performs itself. Her sentences tend toward clarity, and when she reaches for metaphor, it is usually anchored in something physical – a board, a ditch, a scale pattern, the texture of humidity. She is not writing to dazzle; she is writing to make you see. That choice gives “Saving Snakes” an unusual steadiness, as if the prose has adopted the snake’s own economy of movement. Still, the same steadiness can sometimes flatten the book’s dramatic contour. There are stretches where the narrative advances by accumulation rather than escalation – memory stacked on memory, reflection layered on reflection – and the reader may wish for a sharper formal turn, a moment where the book’s ideas crystallize with greater shock. Cagle’s resistance to spectacle is a moral strength, but it can also be, at times, a narrative restraint that keeps the book from the kind of propulsion that makes certain works feel inevitable.
Yet perhaps inevitability would be the wrong aim. Snakes themselves do not offer catharsis. They offer, instead, a kind of eerie honesty: a life lived close to the ground, a life whose expressions are not designed to reassure us, a life we must interpret without the comfort of human cues. In Cagle’s hands, this becomes a mirror held up not only to our fears but to our attention spans. How long can we look at what does not flatter us? How long can we care for what does not petition for our care?
The most quietly radical thing about “Saving Snakes” is that it insists on the reality of an animal we are accustomed to treating as symbol. It asks us to trade allegory for ecology. It asks us to understand that “saving” may mean something less cinematic than we want – preserving habitat corridors, changing the vocabulary of disgust, teaching children to pause – and that the moral work of conservation is, in large part, the work of refusing to look away. That refusal can feel, at moments, like a haunted practice. You become aware of how much disappears while we are distracted, how many lives slip out of existence without a headline, how easily fear becomes permission. The book is, in that sense, unsettling. It does not frighten you with monsters. It frightens you with the ordinary machinery of harm, and with the quiet possibility that the creature under the board will not always be there.
For all its restraint, “Saving Snakes” leaves an afterimage. Not a sermon, not a campaign slogan, but a recalibration: the sense that attention is not merely aesthetic, it is ethical; that to notice is to begin to be responsible; that the world is full of beings surviving our mythology about them. My rating for “Saving Snakes” is 84 out of 100 – a book of uncommon integrity and quiet power, whose greatest achievement is to make the act of looking feel, again, like a form of courage.
The book opens the way many lives in science actually begin – not with a thesis statement, not with the clean white authority of expertise, but with a small patch of overlooked land and a child walking beside a parent. An acre wedged between the machinery of American movement – roads, tollways, the suburban certainty of lawns – becomes, in Cagle’s telling, a universe. A father lifts a piece of plywood. A garter snake is there, not as omen or evil, but as a fact of astonishing beauty: rough gray scales, faded gold striping, the compact legitimacy of an animal that has survived our disregard. The moment is intimate, almost domestic, yet it carries a kind of quiet terror, too – the recognition that whole worlds are hidden under what we toss aside, that the ordinary can turn, in an instant, into the uncanny.
Cagle’s great gift is that she does not use this scene as a sentimental origin myth. She treats it instead as a primer in attention. The child’s awe is allowed to remain awe, but it is braided immediately with the discipline of noticing: what kind of refuge a board provides, what kinds of prey gather in damp darkness, how small a home range can be. The book keeps returning to that braid – lyric immediacy twined with the patient, almost devotional insistence on ecology’s specifics – and it is in that braid that “Saving Snakes” earns its authority. This is not a book that tries to rescue snakes by making them cute. It does not hand them eyebrows or morals. It does not plead. It simply looks, longer than most of us are willing to look, and invites the reader to develop the stamina for that looking.
If “Saving Snakes” were only a memoir of a girl becoming a scientist, it might still be worth reading. But Cagle is after something more stringent, and more difficult: a record of what it costs to care for an animal the culture has already sentenced. Snakes arrive in our stories preloaded. They are the shape of betrayal, the shorthand for treachery, the hiss beneath the world’s first mistake. Even people who consider themselves rational can become suddenly medieval around them, their language reverting to superstition and disgust. Cagle watches this happen again and again – in the casual violence of a shovel, in the relish of a story told at someone else’s expense, in the way fear becomes a social bond – and she refuses to treat it as mere ignorance. It is, she suggests, a deeper habit: the human urge to externalize dread, to give it scales and make it crawl away so we can call ourselves clean.
What gives the book its tensile strength is that Cagle does not pretend she is exempt from the forces she describes. She is frank about the seductions of the scientific persona – the way field biology can be sold as a romance of toughness, a theater of bravado, a parade of “firsts” and “discovered” and “caught.” She remembers the “idols” who populate a young naturalist’s imagination, the larger-than-life figures whose photographs seem to say: be fearless, be singular, be the kind of person who handles danger with a grin. But “Saving Snakes” is a story of demythologizing. The deeper into her own training Cagle goes, the more she becomes suspicious of spectacle. Competence, in her account, looks less like dominance and more like restraint – like moving carefully, recording honestly, admitting what you do not know, resisting the impulse to turn an animal into proof of your own courage.
The middle of the book travels – Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Australia, Peru – yet it does not read like a tourist’s scrapbook of exotic peril. Cagle’s prose is at its best when it refuses the easy thrill of elsewhere. The tropics are not a lush backdrop for self-discovery; they are complicated, human, contested places, full of labor and local knowledge and the long shadows of economics. In Peru, in particular, the book’s ethical frame sharpens. Here the question of snakes cannot be separated from the question of bodies that are most exposed to them: workers, children, people far from clinics and antivenom, people whose vulnerability is not an aesthetic but a daily condition. Cagle does not romanticize fear in this context. She lets it stand as information. She is attentive to the uncomfortable truth that “coexistence” can be a privilege word, easy to pronounce from a safe distance.
One of the book’s most affecting through-lines is its portrait of scientific life as lived rather than imagined. Cagle writes, with unusual clarity, about the precarious scaffolding beneath the field’s romance: the unstable jobs, the temporary housing, the small indignities that accumulate until the body begins to feel like a tool that can be borrowed and returned. There is a chapter whose title, “gumby,” says almost everything about the expectation placed on early-career scientists: be flexible, bend, contort, absorb. The cost is not simply exhaustion. It is a slow erosion of self-trust, a training in swallowing discomfort until discomfort becomes the air you breathe. Here “Saving Snakes” begins to resemble other contemporary narratives of work – in academia, in publishing, in any vocation that trades on passion – where devotion is used as a solvent, dissolving the boundaries that might keep a person intact.
And yet the book does not collapse into complaint. It returns, again and again, to what snakes have taught Cagle about survival: not heroism, but fit; not conquest, but adaptation; not loud persistence, but the quiet insistence of a body doing what it was shaped to do. There is something bracing in her refusal to make a virtue of suffering, and something equally bracing in her refusal to make despair into sophistication. The book is strongest when it names institutional fatigue – the slow-motion tragedy of bureaucratic “concern,” the way conservation can become paperwork that gestures at protection while accepting loss as inevitable – without letting that fatigue become an excuse to stop caring.
The later chapters pivot toward teaching and language: the next generation, the words we use, the ways fear is inherited. Cagle is especially good on the inadequacy of facts delivered like pills. People do not hate snakes because they lack information. They hate snakes because the stories are already there, embedded in the muscle memory of culture. If there is a form of salvation in “Saving Snakes,” it is not conversion through argument; it is the slower conversion of presence. A student holds still long enough to see a snake as an animal rather than a threat. A child learns to say the name of a species without spitting it out. Someone who has always killed on sight chooses, once, not to. These changes are modest, and Cagle does not inflate them into triumph. But she insists that modesty is not the same as insignificance. It is how the world actually shifts.
The book’s style mirrors its ethics. Cagle writes with a clean, attentive lyricism that rarely performs itself. Her sentences tend toward clarity, and when she reaches for metaphor, it is usually anchored in something physical – a board, a ditch, a scale pattern, the texture of humidity. She is not writing to dazzle; she is writing to make you see. That choice gives “Saving Snakes” an unusual steadiness, as if the prose has adopted the snake’s own economy of movement. Still, the same steadiness can sometimes flatten the book’s dramatic contour. There are stretches where the narrative advances by accumulation rather than escalation – memory stacked on memory, reflection layered on reflection – and the reader may wish for a sharper formal turn, a moment where the book’s ideas crystallize with greater shock. Cagle’s resistance to spectacle is a moral strength, but it can also be, at times, a narrative restraint that keeps the book from the kind of propulsion that makes certain works feel inevitable.
Yet perhaps inevitability would be the wrong aim. Snakes themselves do not offer catharsis. They offer, instead, a kind of eerie honesty: a life lived close to the ground, a life whose expressions are not designed to reassure us, a life we must interpret without the comfort of human cues. In Cagle’s hands, this becomes a mirror held up not only to our fears but to our attention spans. How long can we look at what does not flatter us? How long can we care for what does not petition for our care?
The most quietly radical thing about “Saving Snakes” is that it insists on the reality of an animal we are accustomed to treating as symbol. It asks us to trade allegory for ecology. It asks us to understand that “saving” may mean something less cinematic than we want – preserving habitat corridors, changing the vocabulary of disgust, teaching children to pause – and that the moral work of conservation is, in large part, the work of refusing to look away. That refusal can feel, at moments, like a haunted practice. You become aware of how much disappears while we are distracted, how many lives slip out of existence without a headline, how easily fear becomes permission. The book is, in that sense, unsettling. It does not frighten you with monsters. It frightens you with the ordinary machinery of harm, and with the quiet possibility that the creature under the board will not always be there.
For all its restraint, “Saving Snakes” leaves an afterimage. Not a sermon, not a campaign slogan, but a recalibration: the sense that attention is not merely aesthetic, it is ethical; that to notice is to begin to be responsible; that the world is full of beings surviving our mythology about them. My rating for “Saving Snakes” is 84 out of 100 – a book of uncommon integrity and quiet power, whose greatest achievement is to make the act of looking feel, again, like a form of courage.
March 5, 2023
Saving Snakes by Nicolette Cagle is a great read and a very important contribution to snake conservation and wildlife conservation in general. Few animals are as maligned and misunderstood as snakes, yet they are integral to ecosystem health. They are also fascinating creatures and deserving of existence apart from any "utility" they provide to their communities. Cagle brings the world as experienced by snakes to life, from the way they have intimate connection with the environment to the many challenges they face. This is critical to share if human society is ever to move past our fear and prejudice of these fantastic animals. Cagle's personal story as an ecologist makes this book very accessible; her writing is powerful and the breadth of her compassion so encouraging in these times when the environment is on everyone's minds but we largely continue with business as usual. Cagle reminds us that we must find another way. I love this quote toward the end of the book, which echoes what Robin Wall Kimmerer, one of my favorite writers, has described as "species loneliness": "We are bereft of reminders of our interconnectedness with all life. We are bereft of reminders of our mortality. We are bereft of forest friends and stories for our children. Without snakes--as friends or foes--we lose our humanity."
February 5, 2025
A beautiful and inspiring book that I highly recommend to anyone who considers themselves a tree hugger. My first volunteer work was at a nature center where one of my primary jobs was to feed and take care of snakes, and so I deeply resonated with Dr. Cagle’s journey as an ecologist. This book taught me a whole lot about the evolution of snakes, their habitats and defense mechanisms, and generally why we should put more effort into snake conservation. This book also spans why we see snake declines as a result of instilled fear and prejudices and how that translates to perpetuated harms in our lives and in the world as well. It celebrates ecological wins and tells stories of uplifting each other and reminds us that caring, showing up, and asking questions are the basis of restoration work.
May 23, 2023
I wanted to read this book for many reasons - personal connection to the author (full disclosure), a step toward overcoming my own you-should-know-better irrational fear of snakes, and because many of the places the author describes (North Carolina, Australia, Costa Rica) play a part in my life as well. The narrative delivered on all of these aspects, but doubles down on the connection to the human condition - knowledge, empathy, misunderstanding, hubris/humility, self-doubt. In this way, Saving Snakes is about snakes the way Ted Lasso is about soccer - central but also pervasive. Enjoy this glimpse into Nicolette Cagle's thoughtful, comprehensive, and compassionate lens on the world, and come away with a greater appreciation for snakes...and people.
June 12, 2023
Fun and easy and engaging to read. i liked the descriptions of the landscapes and obviously the snakes. a little bit hated all the snake touching but liked the bigger focus on just leaving them alone. and on all the cool things they do and their anatomies. elongated organs?? so ferocious and cool. I wish I saw more snakes on a regular basis. I also had no idea that Rattlesnake roundups were a thing. a long time ago in grad school at Duke I participated in collecting birds that died after crashing into windows especially around CIEMAS and then they put up decals on the windows. I think the author led that effort.
January 30, 2023
This book has inspired me to head out to the backyard and start learning about the species of snakes who share my home with me - and that's saying a lot! From history to biology, personal narrative to policy, Dr. Cagle covers it all in a unique work that should be on every nature lover's bookshelf. Beautiful writing and a great deal of personal reflection make it easy to connect to her storytelling, and I'm left hoping for a Saving Snakes vol. 2 in the future!
January 31, 2023
A quick read, this book inspires its readers to appreciate nature and all its creatures, including those who are usually unloved and unappreciated. The author's personal narrative not only reflects her passion for reptiles and amphibians, but her curiosity, vulnerability, knowledge, strength, and intelligence. A wonderful mix of scientific research, history, and personal experiences, "Saving Snakes" reminds us of the urgent need for conservation and most importantly: kindness.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews