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Black Rat Snake

Pantherophis Obsoletus

Photo by roemer1
Published on Project Noah
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39.005, -92.3602

Field Notes

Description:

By far the biggest snake I have ever caught, around 3-4 feet long and very strong, up till now I had always thought Black Rat Snakes had black scales, but as shown in the second image, they are black, but under those are red and orange and yellow, and close to the belly there are spots, now that I've seen one up close they seem so much prettier than before! All snakes are beautiful in my opinion, (Although my neighbors think otherwise... if they react weirdly to a Ring-neck Snake I wonder what would happen if they saw THESE images...) but now they seem MORE beautiful.

Something I noticed, was that on the top of her head there was a scar, and after catching this epic snake, I remembered a few years ago my cat had injured a juvenile Black Rat Snake on the top of it's head, and we had released it... Apparently they can grow to 5 feet in 3-5 years... Could this have been the same snake?

Habitat:

Out in my front yard, sunning herself on the driveway/wall next to the driveway.

Notes:

As you can see in the first image she has me trapped a little, I had a hard time letting her go since she had her body wrapped around both arms from my back, so I had to transfer her head over to one hand, extricate one arm, and THEN let her go. I decided to nickname this snake Big Bertha, because her coloration and size reminded me of a sword in a certain minecraft mod.
I was returning a bullfrog I had caught (A bit rounder than the last time I saw him. There used to be more frogs in that pond...), and I looked in front of our garage and BAM! Great big black rat snake just chilling. I followed her for a while before calling my mom out to look, then she gave me permission to catch this snake.

And, for any who are curious, no, I did not get bitten. ;)

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