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| Round pupils, large scales between the eyes, black line through the eye, brown rectangular blotches arranged longways across the body, often shiny, head usually only slightly wider then neck = Pacific gopher snake. |
On April 20, I was happy to see the round pupils of a long gopher snake sunning on the gravel in front of the barn. Almost every year I see a long gopher snake in the Dipper farmyard and often it has a reddish color. Same one? I don't know but I just leave these shiny harmless beauties alone and call it/them Stellarosa after a former admired co-worker. Now, years later, I see billboards of a wine called Stella Rosa and it's confusing to me as I drive down the highway and see my fabulous snake name on a wine bottle in the city. I guess if I can put photos of a snake on the annual walnut label then they can . . . no, this is just too disturbing that they can ruin a perfectly good snake name like that.
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| A "cornered" gopher snake. Can you find the sharp tip of the tail? |
On May 29, I spotted the coil of a brown snake slip back under the barn door when the vibrations from my footsteps travelled that way. Wide brown rectangles across its back. Peeking in the barn door, I was relieved to find a long gopher snake trying to disguise itself as a wooden corner stud. Maybe the same one that I saw in April and in previous years. It was too dark to tell if this was the reddish one I call Stellarosa and I decided to leave it be.
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| Looooong and trim and brown. |
I have been dropping hints in these 2015 snake posts about the differences between rattlesnakes and gopher snakes, but you can go
here to get an illustrated description and a fun
quiz to take afterwards. There are other brown snakes in our area that can also be confused with rattlesnakes and as a result are indiscriminately killed - see the end of
this post for ways to tell these brown snakes apart.
Next up is a
luckless racer.
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Pacific Gopher Snake, Pituophis catenifer catenifer
Northern Pacific Rattlesnake, Crotalus oreganus oreganus
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