It was the beauty that hit me. A quiet, almost inaudible gasp of awe, delight, privilege. If you look at nature a lot, it's the sort of thing that happens regularly enough - but you never get used to it. The more wild things you see, the more you increase, rather than decrease, your capacity for wonder.

Snake/beautiful. Is that the response you'd give in a word association test? Probably not: the idea of snake is full of difficult cultural matters: evil, poison, sex, penises, Freud, Eve. My father has a small figure of the Virgin stepping on the head of a snake with the greatest nonchalance.

But if you look at wild things enough, you get a fractionally different perspective. You don't discard your culture, far from it: but your deep and spontaneous responses are more turned to the creatures themselves, less to the stock responses our culture demands. Besides, a real snake is very different from a snake of the mind.

It was the first real day of spring and at last there was real heat in the sun. It was, then, the perfect day to go snake-watching, so off I went with Jules Howard of Froglife, a charity that looks after reptiles and amphibians. If I am a half-decent birder, then Jules is a high-quality snaker. We found it in Forestry Commission land in Northamptonshire.

Adder. There's a sense of power in the beauty of the adder: big-headed, chunky, muscular, looking immensely capable of driving a dose of venom into anything it chooses. That sense of sleek, robust purpose is something I have seen in jaguars. Both are killing machines, though it's voles rather than deer that are prey for adders. They are venomous, though no one has died from an adder bite in this country for more than 20 years. Most snakebites happen to people handling them; no adder has the slightest interest in biting either you or your dog. It would have a job swallowing either.

Does some of their beauty derive from their deadliness? The black-and-white zigzag patterning of an adder basking in unaccustomed sun is not only highly effective camouflage, it is also more beautiful than it needs to be. Never mind the book of Genesis, this was not evil but good.

Reptile house

And a grass snake, too, found in a rather sinister place outside Peterborough, full of dead bicycles and condoms. Its muddy-water colour is helpful to it in its appointed task of thinning out the frog population, but the yellow beneath the chin makes you gasp with delight, along with the preternatural brightness of the eye.

Wild creatures do not pick places for their beauty but because they work. Good for frogs, good for grass snakes.

You can leave out a small chunk of corrugated metal - try it in your garden - and reptiles will come to it because it works as a heat trap and a reptile can always use a bit of heat. We lifted one up and saw beneath a grass snake, raising its head at the sudden burst of light, brief but impossible beauty, before sliding away with the infinite grace of snakekind. Grass snakes are not venomous; just as well for our nerves, perhaps, because they can grow up to 5ft long. A big grass snake is one of the most impressive bits of wildlife in this country.

Watch your step

There's one more British snake - I still have smooth snake on my to-do list. Not many, then. All the more reason to treasure them. Not everyone sees it that way, I know. Many people have a dread of snakes. Odd, these strange fears: far more sensible to be frightened of teenage drink-drivers, who are much more likely to kill you, or to cringe at a policeman's holstered gun, which is far more efficient at killing you.

I would mock such uncontrollable fears if I were able to contemplate vast spiders without dread. The beauty of spiderkind tends to pass me by. True, the number of people savaged to death by spiders is comparatively small, but what's rationality got to do with it? In the South American jungles, I travel in fear not of jaguars and snakes but furry spiders.

If these fears are an atavistic survival mechanism, they have been scattered in a fearfully random manner across the world's population. Besides, a dread of snakes won't stop you treading on one by mistake and it's hard to see what survival advantages any human being ever got from arachnophobia.

But we must rise above such things. Those privileged to see a snake should contemplate its beauty and walk on, enriched rather than diminished by the encounter. We are lucky to have them and we need to support organisations such as Froglife if we are to hold on to them. A glimpse of black-and-white zigzag, a moment's glance at an almost hidden touch of Van Gogh yellow and a retreat of flowing grace that uses the ground beneath with the same glorious sympathy as a bird uses the air. Beauty.

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