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
C. S. Giscombe his childhood fascination with trains as having an influence in his writing, noting that the railroad is "not sentimental...continuous...intimately connected to features of land and water." C. S. Giscombe C. S. Giscombe (born 1950 Dayton, Ohio) is an African-American poet, essayist, and professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of SUNY at Albany and Cornell University, he was editor of "Epoch magazine" in the 1970s and 1980s. He has taught at Cornell University, Syracuse University, Illinois State University, and Pennsylvania State University. As of 2015, he teaches at University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in