When 6-year-old Kylee Kennon was visiting her dad in Schwenksville on Oct. 7, she made an interesting discovery – one that made her do a double-take.
While romping about outside, she came across a two-headed snake.
Kylee carefully replaced the piece of wood under which she had found the two-headed wonder and then ran to get her dad, William Kennon.
“She came flying into the house screaming about a two-headed snake and I knew she was probably telling the truth,” said dad. “After all, who would make that up?”
Kylee – who thinks it’s a bit too soon in her academic career to settle on a herpetology career – said she is of two minds about showing off her discovery for show-and-tell in her kindergarten class at Barth Elementary School in the Pottstown School District; that’s if her teacher, Megan Meier, would even allow it.
Although she would like to show her classmates, Kylee is worried about the snake’s health.
“It might die,” she said with a frown.
That’s a valid concern.
Gordon Burghardt, a herpetologist with the University of Tennessee, was quoted in a 2002 National Geographic article as saying two-headed snakes rarely survive in the wild.
“Just watching them feed, often fighting over which head will swallow the prey, shows that feeding takes a good deal of time, during which they would be highly vulnerable to predators,” Burghardt said in the article. “They also have a great deal of difficulty deciding which direction to go, and if they had to respond to an attack quickly they would just not be capable of it.”
In captivity, they tend to do better, according to this article, noting that a two-headed king snake survived in captivity at the University of Arizona for 17 years. In another instance, a two-headed corn snake, appropriately named Thelma and Louise, produced 15 normal offspring while living at the San Diego Zoo.
Kylee has not yet named her snake but she has already made a name for herself as a result of her discovery.
“I’ve never seen it before,” she said with that particular sense of wonder often the sole province of small children.
Who can blame her?