seen at the country house

I was standing at the work table in the big room looking out the open back door...yes, that was me complaining about the freezing weather here last week and yes, two days later it was in the upper 60s and I had the doors and windows open...and I noticed the cat sitting outside watching some thing on the ground and every now and then giving it a tentative whack with her paw. So, OK, I thought, what little creature is she terrorizing now, and I walked out to see what it was and if it needed rescuing.

Curled up at her feet was a small snake (I say small, it was about 18” long I think), head up and mouth open. The first thing I did was grab up the cat and throw her inside. The next thing I did was try to identify the snake. It was dark brown and light brown and had a distinctive pattern. We have harmless rat snakes that are two tone brown and I've seen several of those around here. I was trying to remember what my sister had told me about poisonous snakes in Texas, that there are really only four different kinds..rattlesnakes, water moccasins (also known as cottonmouths), coral snakes and copperheads...and that the easiest way to determine if it is one of those is to look at the shape of it's head, that all the poisonous snakes in Texas have spade shaped heads.

'Hey Marc, does this look like a spade shaped head to you?' I called out as I was zeroing in with the macro on my camera. 'You think this is a rat snake or a copperhead?'

A quick look in the 50 Common Reptiles And Amphibians was inconclusive. On to a google image search. 'Oh,' he says, 'it might be a copperhead.' Um, yep. I'd say it's a copperhead all right.

I didn't want to kill it. I had felt really guilty about killing the 2' coral snake two years ago and copperheads have the least toxic venom of the venomous snakes, so I grabbed up a small bucket and a piece of cardboard and a stick and maneuvered it into the bucket and carted it to the far side of my neighbor's property and let it go in the wild space.

And where exactly was this snake? Where I have found almost every snake I have seen out here...about 10' from my back door.

* Well now, upon further investigation it might not have been copperhead after all, perhaps just a harmless rat snake. The markings were pretty irregular instead of the distinct 'hourglass' shape that copperheads have. These two snakes are often confused.

* OK, definitely a rat snake. A rat snake has round pupils and a copperhead has elliptical pupils like a cat's.