March
27th. I’ve only had two encounters with snakes at Fort Yargo State Park. The
first was sighting an Eastern Kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula) drinking water at
the side of the Section B boat launch. The second was an encounter, late one
afternoon, with a Black Rat Snake (Elaphe [Pantheris] obsoleta obsoleta on the
trail near the dam.
On
March 27th, I was on the trail, almost back to the Section B parking
lot - thinking about these encounters and wondering when I’d have another one -
when I saw dark line across the trail. The tell-tale kinked pose was
indicative of a Black Rat Snake.
When I got closer I saw that, indeed, it was a…
beautiful
Black Rat Snake, about 2.5 to 3 feet in length.
Most
Black Rat Snakes I’ve seen in the past, and later in the year, have been almost
black and matte. It was striking that this snake was shiny; it looked as if it
had been polished. It took a bit of reading but I found, here, that these
snakes shed their skin soon after they emerge in the Spring.
It’s
nice that Black Rat Snakes don’t ‘run’; they usually ‘freeze’. This makes it
easy to get a good look at the snake, and its…
pattern
that is not easy to see when the skin is dark and matte.
The
snake had been heading down towards the water but, between a pair of cyclists
who came along and me, decided to head back the way it had come. I waited until
is was safely back into the grass before I left.
Identification
resource:
- Savannah
River Ecology Laboratory: Rat Snake (Elaphe [Pantherophis] obsoleta)
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