Northern water snake The belly also varies in color. It can be white, yellow, or gray. Usually it also has reddish or black crescents. The northern water snake is nonvenomous and harmless to humans, but superficially resembles the venomous cottonmouth and is often killed unnecessarily as a result of this mistaken identity. The two can be easily distinguished by morphological traits: the water snake has a longer, more slender body and a flattened head the same width as the neck, round pupils, and no heat-sensing pits. The cottonmouth has a fatter body, a wedge-shaped head with prominent venom glands that are wider than
European water vole farm. C. S. Calverley a 19th-century writer of (among other things) light verse, in his poem "Shelter," beginning: "By the wide lake's margin I mark'd her lie--" "The wide, weird lake where the alders sigh--" Tells of an apparently shy, easily frightened young female by a lakeside, who in the last line of the poem, it's revealed that: "For she was a water-rat." European water vole The European water vole or northern water vole ("Arvicola amphibius", included in synonymy: "A. terrestris"), is a semiaquatic rodent. It is often informally called the water rat, though it only superficially resembles a true