Frank Fleming and his wife own 120 acres of land in Costa Rica and have had trail cameras there for well over a decade. They love seeing what’s going on with the local wildlife, so when Fleming noticed one of his cameras had been obscured, he was immediately annoyed.
“When I walked up to the camera, I was a bit irritated that a branch had fallen in front of it, because it’s a great spot for wildlife, and branches can obscure the animals,” Fleming told The Dodo. “The small branch was wedged under the camera but above the metal bracket, making [it] not so easy to move.”
Frank Fleming
Normally Fleming is very aware of his surroundings, but he was so focused on getting the camera working that he wasn’t really paying attention to anything else. He was hard at work trying to get the branch free when he noticed someone dangerous had beaten him to the camera: a white-tailed hognose viper.
Fleming is very familiar with snakes and talks about them on his YouTube channel. He’d encountered this type of pit viper before, and knew the little guy was pretty rare — and venomous.
Frank Fleming
“Being a ‘snake person,’ I’m usually always on the lookout between camera stops, but the ‘camera trapper’ in me was too busy obsessing over how much footage I’d missed,” Fleming wrote on Facebook. “If I had reached for that latch without looking, I’d be typing this from the ER.”
Luckily, Fleming was able to jump back in time and assess the situation. He doesn’t like to move any wildlife he encounters if he can help it, but he needed to remove the stick and get the memory card out of the camera.
“I unscrewed the camera from the base to easily get the stick free, and when I did that, the snake made a couple of long strikes at me,” Fleming said. “Then it wiggled off the support log, and I was able to use another stick to lift it over … into a pile of sticks and leaves.”
Fleming was able to complete his mission without any harm coming to him or his snake friend. He later posted photos of the encounter online — and many people also had trouble spotting the snake.
Frank Fleming
“A lot [of] folks (even snake folks) didn’t see the snake at first either because it blends in,” Fleming said. “As I said before, I’m [a] snake person, so a lot of friends enjoyed the picture of this unusual species.”
The entire experience was a great reminder for Fleming to always keep his eyes open when he’s out checking the trail cameras. You never know who might be hanging around.
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