It's Raining Snakes! Or, The AI I Can't Live Without
- Meg Vlaun
- Jun 27
- 8 min read
27 June 2026
Let this be the first of a series of little tales about my life in Rural NC
and my daily run-ins with the wilderness that surrounds me.
Not sure when it happened—maybe it solidified in my mind sometime yesterday but had been stewing for weeks, or months, before then. In late August of last year, after over two decades of moving every two years for the military, we made our final move (we hope) into our “forever” (tongue-in-cheek) home: a lake house in rural North Carolina. As a sensitive, I knew I wanted to be somewhat away from people, so I coveted a bit of land with some space from neighbors. We found such a place: a log home on about four acres on the mostly drowsy Flat Swamp Creek area of High Rock Lake near Denton, NC. And maybe a part of me suspected that such rurality might be accompanied by an increased exposure to and engagement with Mother Earth, but now the wilderness is my backyard, side yard, front yard, and at some point within the past month, week, yesterday, it dawned on me that maybe what the world needs most right now (or at least sensitives like me trapped in an urban and/or digital environment) is some exposure to nature. A reminder to slow TF down.
So let this essay be the first of a series of little tales about my life in Rural NC and my daily run-ins with the wilderness that now surrounds me.
And, of course, because it only makes the most sense, this little story is about AI.
This past week, my eldest (20) came home for a visit from where she currently lives, in Ft Collins, CO, and with her arrival, she brought my first lake-swimming companion in nearly a year. Last Sunday we spent the entire day flinging ourselves from the dock into the 85-degree water: cannonballs, backflips, swan dives, back dives. My dog, Lexi, threw her octogenarian hips into the mix, jumping in with us each time and then swimming around to the stairs to come back out and jump in again. At one point, the three of us even swam across the lake to the undeveloped lot across the way, where my kid and I skipped rocks and Lexi chased them, bewildered each time that when they hit the water they seemed to disappear—to un-exist.
At sometime around nine that night we grew cold, so we wrapped ourselves in towels and sat on the pier listening to fish jump while Lexi licked water off her legs. The breeze created such a chill we could not run the fan to keep bugs away, and within about 20 minutes, two mosquitoes had attacked my right upper arm, smearing blood when I smacked them away. So kiddo and I decided to go in and clean up.
About two thirds of our way back up to the house, some large thing came crashing down in the backyard somewhere about ten or twenty feet off the back porch. It was all sorts of smashing, slapping, rustling leaves all the way down, and then a dried-leafy thump!
“What was that?! Did you hear that?”
“I thought it was you!”
“NO! Something just crashed down over there.”
We rushed inside together, a mix of terrified and intrigued.
Once inside, I found my husband on the living room couch and asked him whether my son had just thrown something off the back porch. He had no idea what I was talking about. So I ran to the front door, where we hang all of our high-powered flashlights on hooks. Note: We’d never needed a collection of high-powered flashlights ready-to-serve at any home prior to this, but we’d been battling bats in the belfry (a story for another day—actually my WIP novel’s premise), and so there the torches collected.
I grabbed the largest and ran out to the back porch. My baby followed.
A few broad sweeps of the flashlight revealed nothing—although I’m not at all sure what I had expected to discover. We moved further along the porch, and I narrowed in on the area where I specifically thought I’d heard the thing land. I necked the flashlight’s beam down to a ray and swept it slowly over the ground.
There it was: something large, coiled, black, and shiny, as if it were oiled.
And I knew it instantly: a rat snake.
Although it was coiled, we estimated it at about five feet—a full-grown adult. Its stomach was distended with what must’ve been an adult squirrel.
But. A rat snake just fell from a tree?
OK. Now let’s rewind.
First of all, the only reason I knew it was a rat snake at all was because of a solo camping trip I’d taken a month prior at Morrow Mountain State Park. While on this week-long solo camping trip (not very far from home, mind you, so that my husband could swoop in and rescue me in case I had some crisis), after a morning writing a short story, I decided to hike Sugarloaf Mountain Trail. Whilst on this trail, just past the midway point and Sugarloaf Mountain’s peak, a long, black rope blocked my path. At first, it startled me. I jumped back up the trail some five feet, my heart pounding in my ears. But then I saw its adorable iridescent head and watched its forked tongue flick: it had zero interest in me. It was just crossing the trail—a trail that actually technically was crossing its territory in the first place. So I was crossing its path.
For posterity, I whipped out my phone to snap a few photos, none of which truly captured the snake’s size, at something over five feet. So instead I switched to video for a minute. My only true concern was whether the snake was venomous, frankly. I suspected it wasn’t, as I’d learned from zoos in the past that venomous snakes always have that triangle-shaped head because of their venom sacs on their cheeks. And this guy’s head was narrow. Cute, even. But still, a niggling anxiety kept me at a very wary distance.
Then it dawned on me: my iPhone can tell me what sort of snake this is. Yes, my friends. Yes—it can. Since we’d moved into our new home, I’d been using my Photos app to tell me whether certain shrubs are poison ivy, the types of trees on our property, and even that the heart-shaped vine growing under my birdfeeder is morning glory. I opened the photo I’d taken of the snake and clicked the little “info” button at the bottom center of the screen which had by then turned into the shape of a little lizard, and my camera app asked me if I’d like to “look up rat snakes”?
Why yes, obviously.
According to Wikipedia, rat snakes are harmless to humans. They’re constrictors, and they eat small mammals (mostly rodents), and sometimes also lizards, birds, etc.
I stopped and looked around the hiking path. Sure enough, although we had a gazillion squirrels back at home just 30 miles north of Morrow Mountain, there were absolutely zero on that Sugarloaf Mountain hike.
About a mile further down, yet another five-foot rat snake crossed my path. By then, I was besotted by this reptile. I took some five minutes’ worth of video until it had passed beyond the path and my view from it. As a leave-no-tracer, I did not follow.
So this coiled, black thing that had fallen from a tree in our backyard was absolutely, definitely a rat snake. It looked precisely like the ones I’d encountered in Morrow Mountain State Park.
But did it really just fall from a tree!?
You’ll see no reference to such behavior on the Wikipedia site, my friends, beyond mentioning that they might “bask on tree branches.” It was time to dig deeper into the interwebs, and somewhere on a few Reddit posts, there was our answer: rat snakes are efficient, skilled climbers; they often climb up into trees to raid squirrel and bird nests. And although they are skilled, because they lack and sort of hands or fingers, they do often lose their balance and fall out of the trees they have climbed.
By the time my daughter and I had scrambled down to the ground where we’d seen the snake from above, it was gone. Slithered off silently—perhaps into a den—to digest its dinner.
It’s become a pattern, since we moved in, that I’ve turned to AI to learn about my new environment. The Photos app on my iPhone is great, but so too is the Cornell Lab’s Merlin app (which recently helped our family identify the sweet whistle of a hungry barred owlet). And as with all AI I’ve encountered, of course these apps can fail, at times. The Photos app will claim poison ivy to be poison oak—or worse: something altogether innocuous, which it is not. The Merlin app will tell us that what we’re hearing might be a red-tailed hawk, but probably not because those are extremely uncommon in our area—even while we’re staring at the red-tailed hawk circling above our heads. Still, I find these non-LLM-based, non-generative, focused AIs are drawing me closer to nature rather than pulling me from it.
It reminds me of the two years we were stationed in Madrid, Spain. Although I was practically fluent in both German and French, I’d never learned a lick of Spanish before age 36, and then suddenly I was forced to. At that time, in 2016, I turned frequently to Google Translate for help. Help with menus, help with signs, help with conversations, and help with texting my Ukranian cleaning lady who spoke no English whatsoever. At the time, perhaps, I could sense how Google Translate might become a crutch for me if I were not willing to try to learn something from the app—and with my background in language learning, using the tool as a tool instead of a crutch came easily to me. I turned to the tool whenever I encountered a word I did not know, then replaced my phone in my pocket where it belonged. My exchanges with Spanish speakers did not ever happen with a device settled between us; I did not allow the application to do my thinking for me but instead employed it as guide only when absolutely needed. As a result, my conversational Spanish developed quickly, and I grew in my confidence and began engaging with others in Spanish willfully and intentionally. At that time, Google Translate proffered me my agency.
That is how I feel about AI-powered Merlin and the Photos apps today.
One of these technologies draws us closer to home
while the other draws us away.
There is an important distinction to be made between the capabilities and usages of specialized machine learning and vision models like the Photos and Merlin apps versus LLMs like GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. And this distinction is playing out on moral/ethical grounds. At the very least, one of these sorts of technology seems to draw us closer to home while the other draws us away.
And as a sensitive, I feel that.
The morning after that rat snake crashed to the earth, my husband was out on the back porch shining flashlights into bat cubbies to see if we had any stragglers after our recent relocation efforts. As he was there, he happened to notice in a tree just fifteen feet above his head a disrupted squirrel’s nest. He called me out to him, and we inspected it together. It was located directly above where the rat snake had landed on the earth the night before. After months of cursing our seeming unlimited population of squirrels that would ravage my songbird feeders, I was elated: finally, a friendly rat snake had moved in to predate on this rampant population! A population which, of course, I had encouraged by my unnatural feeding of songbirds…but let’s leave the ethics of songbird feeding for another day.
Yesterday, the Photos app identified a five-foot king snake in the front yard, which has since curled up under a thick thatch of invasive English Ivy. This story has no real ending. There are no limits to my new engagements with nature. So, I’ll be back again with more soon—this time on something other than snakes.
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