When it comes to snakes, myths and folklore abound: They travel in pairs. They drink milk. Red touching yellow will kill a fellow. And then there’s an especially odd maxim in the mix: If you smell a cucumber in the woods, there’s a copperhead nearby. That combination of scent and species is so specific that we had to bring in an expert to find out if there’s any truth to it.
“To put it gently…hell no,” says herpetologist JJ Apodaca, the executive director of the Asheville-based Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. But like most old sayings, this one didn’t just fall out of the sky, and the possible reasons behind it are pretty interesting.
When threatened, all snakes have a defensive trick up their (metaphorical) sleeves: They emit musk from their cloacas to deter whatever is messing with them. “It’s one of those smells that smells different to different people,” Apodaca says. Some say it has a cucumber or melon-like scent; others say it’s fishy. But you’re not likely to detect it unless you’re directly tangling with the animal. “If you are smelling a copperhead at all, you are probably either handling the snake or trying to kill it—and that means you’ve put yourself in a bad situation already,” Apodaca says. “You have about as much chance to avoid that situation by smelling cucumber as you do avoiding a car crash by smelling burning rubber.”
There’s another likely culprit behind the copperhead-cuke myth: Many native plants in Southern woods and wetlands smell like cucumbers—maidenhair fern, ozark gourd, and wild, bur, and creeping cucumbers, to name a few—and they’re a far more likely source of the aroma than a musking copperhead that doesn’t even smell like cucumber to many people in the first place.
So the next time you walk through the woods and breathe in that unmistakable fresh, crisp fragrance, don’t panic; you’re almost certainly inhaling the scent of local flora. However, Apodaca has another piece of wisdom that might keep you on your toes: Snakes are all around us, all the time. In the wilds of the South, the answer to the question “Is there a copperhead nearby?” is very often yes.
“Just leave them alone and you’ll be just fine,” he says. “Your grandma survived the Southern outdoors, and so will you.” That’s a maxim we’ll hang our hat on.
