Wildlife Spotting

Well we wouldn't be like that if people wouldn't use the same name for 5+ species ;) It's so confusing!

Ironically, from the link I posted, I learned that herpetologists are extremely picky about common names. lol

Wiki usually takes several years to get updated haha. And "black snake" is a terrible common name! Just as bad as "chicken snake", drives me crazy when people use that because it refers to many species and they never know what it actually is haha

Oh, I didn't know because Wiki doesn't give that many specifics and even referred to it as Texas blacksnake. If you drop the "Texas", can it also be called simply a black snake? 0:-)

The common name is black rat snake or western rat snake. The name Texas rat snake was a subspecies, but when the genus switched to Pantherophis from Elaphe they got rid of subspecies for this specific species.

Here's a matching photo with some info: http://mdc.mo.gov/media/image/texas-ratsnake-black-rat-snake-0?popup