buzzworm
n.— «Being in the sun, perhaps the bike path was too warm for this 30-inch buzzworm, a pit viper species common to California and known to biologists and Latin scholars as Crotalus viridis oreganos, or Northern Pacific Rattlesnake.» —“Bikepath buzzworm” by winehiker Winehiker Witiculture Sept. 22, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
While reading Dean Koontz’s book The House at the End of the World (Bookshop|Amazon), a listener in Ramona, California, encountered the perfect word for the walks he takes with his dog. He now refers to such an excursion as a sniffari. This is...
Thank you for referencing my post. I first encountered the term “buzzworm” when reading Edward Abbey back in the late 1970s. Here’s a reference to the term in Abbey’s “The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader (1996).“