Then I hope you never meet one, because they hiss and puff up and spread their necks like a cobra. If that doesn’t scare you off, they will play dead.
While we are identifying snakes, we came upon this snake shedding in Laurel Hill Plantation in Mt. Pleasant, SC: https://picasaweb.google.com/114630942014799287291/DropBox?authkey=Gv1sRgCMeo_YmZ6ujKSA#5795996361598993826
We believe that it is a yellow rat snake. It is about 4.5 inches long. Is that correct?
Surely you don’t mean 4.5 inches long? 45 inches or 4.5 feet, maybe?
It’s tough to ID a snake skin from a photo, but if there is a little line or crease along the middle of each dorsal scale, indicating a keeled scale, and if you can make out faint indications of four stripes on the skin, then I think yellow rat snake is a good possibility.
Oops! 4.5 ft, as indicated by the photo. I don’t have the skin any more. We found it in a natural habitat and left it there. But yes, I believe there was a crease in each dorsal scale, but I cannot recall if it had 4 stripes on the skin. The skin gave a mottled impression.
https://picasaweb.google.com/114630942014799287291/DropBox?authkey=Gv1sRgCMeo_YmZ6ujKSA#5797782697108311490 And this is a shedding we saw today. We believe this is of a black racer.