Searching for one of the world’s most beautiful snakes

On a chilly winter night, herpetologist Tasman Ezra joined a small group of reptile lovers as they spread out through a misty cloud forest in western Honduras, anxiously searching for the endangered snake that had brought them together. They wore knee-high rubber boots and scanned the mossy trunks and damp leaves around them with high-powered headlamps that cut through the fog. The country was in the midst of a cold front, and for two nights running they hadn’t found their prize. But tonight the clouds had broken, and the team spotted, in quick succession, several signs of cold-blooded life: a salamander, a frog, and then another frog.

An hour past dusk, Ezra’s shout cut through the forest: “Thalassinus! Thalassinus!” Within the long, dark leaves of a bromeliad attached to a tree trunk, he had glimpsed a few patches of iridescent green scales. They belonged to a particular species: Bothriechis thalassinus, colloquially known to some devotees as the jade palm pit viper or thalassinus.

With its electric green body punctuated by lines of black, turquoise, gray, and sometimes pink, thalassinus exerts an irresistible pull on “herpers,” the reptile-and-amphibian equivalent of bird-watchers. Part of the snake’s allure is that researchers know very little about it. Every observation reveals something new about the species, which can grow to more than two feet long and is thought to prey on frogs, mice, and other small critters that scurry around at night.

That enthusiasm has helped turn this stunning and venomous snake, perfectly adapted to its remote and ethereal habitat, into a symbol of the western Honduran cloud forest and is the spark behind a growing local interest in protecting the terrain. In fact, several years ago, this very mountain was on its way to being clear-cut for a coffee plantation. Instead, Ezra and a team of herpers raised money in a last-ditch attempt to buy it and turn it into a nature reserve now run by their own conservation group called HonduHerp. But that was only the beginning. As the surrounding communities have come to recognize the snake’s value to the ecosystem, they’ve begun to devise other creative ways to safeguard the forests that this extraordinary animal calls home.

The jade palm pit viper is thought to live only in the tropical cloud forests of western Honduras and eastern Guatemala, which are increasingly threatened by deforestation. “Coffee is the cancer,” says Alexander Alvarado, a local bird-watching guide who has become a passionate herper and now serves on HonduHerp’s board of directors. The cash crop grows well at the same elevations where the vipers thrive, leading to the replacement of cloud forests with coffee farms. “These mountains”—thalassinuses’ mountains—“are just disappearing,” says Ezra. Honduras lost a quarter of its humid primary forests between 2002 and 2024, according to estimates by Global Forest Watch.

For Ezra and his longtime friend and fellow reptile enthusiast CJ Baker, the turning point came in 2023, when Alvarado alerted them that yet another mountain near the town of Santa Rita was about to be sold and clear-cut for coffee. Ezra and Baker, both of whom live in the United States but had fallen in love with herping in biodiverse Honduras, jumped into action. They started desperately posting on social media and asking everyone they could think of—“friends, family, friends of family, family of friends,” Ezra says—for donations. They raised $50,000 to buy the mountaintop and founded HonduHerp to run it. They’ve since turned the land into a locally managed and legally protected reserve called Tierra del Tamagás.

But fundraising alone wouldn’t be sustainable. While some environmental scientists see crowdfunding as an increasingly important financial tool for protecting species and habitats around the world, a disproportionate amount of the money raised has often gone to protecting mammals and birds. Researchers in Australia recently found that less than 15 percent of crowdfunded conservation projects globally focused on reptiles and amphibians. “It’s an uphill battle with snakes,” Ezra says.

Rallying the community seemed like the best way to make a continued impact. Not everyone may be a natural-born herper, so HonduHerp has been working to change perceptions of the jade palm pit viper by emphasizing the reptile’s rare and delicate beauty. “It’s like a fever,” Gabriel Arita, HonduHerp’s regional conservation coordinator, says of the excitement of spotting a thalassinus. “And we started infecting our friends.”

The group now works closely with Honduras’s National Institute of Forest Conservation to co-manage Cerro Azul Copán National Park and several other protected areas in the region. It has established several thalassinus breeding pairs, each from a different mountain, at Rosy Walther Zoo in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, which may be used to augment struggling populations and help researchers study the species’ needs and behavior.

As thalassinus fever spread in and around Santa Rita, more Hondurans learned how to herp in order to catch a glimpse of the town’s elusive emblem, including Francisco Cueva, a local coffee farmer and former hunter. After joining the herping fold, Cueva began to think more carefully about his impact on the ecosystem. He’s now manager of Tierra del Tamagás Reserve, protecting the forest and the animals in it from poachers and loggers, and regularly monitoring its number of thalassinuses and other reptiles and amphibians. “I went from visiting [the forest] to destroy it to visiting to protect it,” he says.

When Arita and Cueva go to local schools for snake safety presentations, they encourage respect for all the region’s snake species while trying to dispel students’ fears of being bitten. (A thalassinus’s venom would probably be painful and cause swelling but isn’t thought to be fatal to humans.) After a recent presentation, rapt students lined up to pose for photos as Arita draped a boa across their shoulders. Their parents may soon be among the many people who call the HonduHerp team to rescue snakes they find in their homes, rather than reaching for a machete. Opinions are slowly shifting: A thalassinus mural decorates a wall along Santa Rita’s main road; another guards a nearby swimming pool.

One of the newly converted thalassinus fans is coffee farmer Enrrique Guerra. He’d received offers to “chainsaw” his forest and plant more coffee, but he knew that would be a mistake. “The mountain,” he says, “is the lung of the community,” supplying clean air and fresh water to the towns below. HonduHerp is now helping him turn his own mountaintop land into a second reserve. Protecting the jade palm pit viper means protecting the entire cloud forest, including dozens of other endangered species, from rare tree frogs to remarkable birds such as the resplendent quetzal.

Between the two reserves, the group has helped conserve nearly 300 acres of threatened land so far. The community continues to find its own way to take the mission even further. After Cueva’s neighbors saw his work in Tierra del Tamagás, they approached him about ways to protect the land between that reserve and their village of San Manuel, to safeguard the water that flows down from the mountaintop. Cueva and HonduHerp helped the community establish its own nationally protected area around the forest’s creeks, another 170 acres of land saved from the threat of deforestation in the jade palm pit viper’s honor. Beyond these reserves, HonduHerp is also building relationships with coffee farmers to encourage the use of shade-grown techniques, with the goal of preserving the forest canopy—or even planting more trees—on their properties.

Back in Tierra del Tamagás Reserve last winter, one of the herpers approached the thalassinus within its bromeliad shelter, extending a long pole with a hook on one end to gently lift the magnificent snake into view. It was a juvenile, measuring about a foot long. Everybody gasped, unable to contain their excitement. “That is such a beauty,” Ezra said.

For as many thalassinuses as the herpers have seen, each encounter with the mysterious snake still feels special. So many questions about the species remain: How many individual jade palm pit vipers live in the reserve? What do they eat, and how often? How far can an individual travel over the course of a night, a month, a season? Can the snakes survive in secondary forests that have regrown over the past few decades, or do they depend exclusively on old-growth primary forests? This expedition, meanwhile, has contributed to an entirely unexpected discovery: Jade palm pit vipers hunker down in plants during cold snaps.

One day soon, HonduHerp hopes to have the resources to implant individual thalassinuses with tags and radio transmitters to track their movements and help find answers, which will guide the group’s conservation strategy and significantly expand scientific knowledge about this increasingly appreciated but still little-known species. Until then, the team is more than happy to do the muddy and exhausting work of searching for more jade palm pit vipers deep into the night. After all, that’s what herpers live for.