First gray rat snake of 2017

Connie and I were walking around the property yesterday, and we wound up near the bird feeders outside the bedroom windows. I happened to glance down at the base of the fringe tree near the feeders, and there was a gray rat snake about 3.5 feet long laying there. So I just reached down and picked him up. He musked a little bit, but was otherwise pretty calm about the whole deal. Sorry, no pics, because he had a suspiciously shaped lump in his belly. I wondered why the finches had been scarce all day.

Connie went and got a snake bag, so we gently bagged him up, trying not to scare him into regurging the meal, and we stored him in the old reptile building until we could run out this morning and release him in the Apalachicola national forest near by. I suspect we will find more of these critters over the next few months.

Last year I saw the brightest yellow rat snake, that was actually yellow, and about 5 feet long. I've seen immature ones that were golden in color, but that adult was special. The first thing that pops into your head, or mine, was should I catch it, followed by where would I put it, and then what would I do with it. So it's still in the wild. I happened to be talking to a fellow about field herping near the Peace River. He was actually trying to take pictures of rattlesnakes. I told him I was more interested in seeing Corn snakes or Rat snakes. He said I'm wasting my time looking on the ground, I should be looking in the trees, as that's where he finds them.

Actually, I think every time I have ever found a corn snake in the wild it was either crossing a road or laying up underneath something. Good chance I just walked past lots of others if they were up in tree branches.

Since the guy told me that I have looked for them but you know how thick the brush is down here. There could be 1,000 snakes 10 feet off the road and you would never see them. I have kicked up some black spiny tailed iguanas just a half mile from my house.
Most of the snakes I've seen have been crossing the road.

Heck, you could have a dozen small corn snakes in a small cabbage palm and you would never see them.

Not only that, but they are excellent burrowers as well, so you could be walking right over them and not know it. I remember once I released a wild caught female that I had caught gravid. After she laid her eggs, I didn't want to keep her any longer (after giving her several meals, of course). So I took her back to where I had found her. It was near an old trash area that looks like it had been there for decades and eroded down to ground level and below. I just laid her on the trash pile and she pretty much pushed her nose into the loose sand and debris and just disappeared in a matter of seconds.

I also read about hunting upper keys corns somewhere a long time ago where someone mentioned that an excellent place to look for those corns in the keys is in any stone or shell piles. Evidently the corns will just burrow into them.

As I heard mention of someone saying a long while back, "snakes are where you find them."

While fishing my canal I hooked a couple black piling wraps that were laying on the bottom. I laid them out on the vacant lot next to me, thinking they would be a perfect place for a snake to hide. I checked under them for two years and never found anything at all under them. I've found old plywood signs laying in vacant lots and looked under them and there was nothing. Apparently, the snakes prefer natural hiding places. I am limited in some of the places I can search because the Brazilian Pepper trees are all over down here, and their leaves can cause a rash like poison ivy.