Red touch yellow, kill a fellow.
Red touch black, venom lack.
For several years my private office door opened onto a public area where snakes were displayed, including Eastern Coral Snakes and their local mimics the Scarlet Kingsnake and the Scarlet Snake. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve heard people trying to recite some variant of this rhyme, but it must have been thousands. I think I could count the number of times it was recited *correctly *on the fingers (minus the thumb) of one hand.
**panman_1960 **is right, best advice is to just leave candy cane snakes alone. And if you must, memorize only the first line, skip the second. That is enough to differentiate the Coral from any other ringed snake here in the eastern US. But if you travel to Central or South America, all bets are off. There are Coral Snake species with all sorts of colorations and patterns. Reciting snake ID poetry there is likely to spoil your vacation.
Snakes are kind of cool, but why wouldn’t you just leave them all alone? Except for Blacksnakes, I haven’t heard of any snake in the northeast that would make a good pet. Reminds me of someone who told me that if I see a skunk in the daytime, leave it alone because skunks are nocturnal and it might be rabid. I told him I leave skunks alone any time of the day or night.
I would leave them alone usually, but my husband is the “run away” type and I’m trying to convince him that it isn’t necessary. If I see a snake in the wild, I’ll stop and watch it. He will high-tail it out of Dodge. If I see a snake in a really populated area, I may catch it and release it in the woods, however. For example, I once found a 3’ long or so black snake near the mailboxes at the townhomes I used to live at. I carried it into the woods and let it go because I could just see someone coming out and killing it just for being there. :mad:
Herpotaxonimists must be really boring people. “What do you call that brown snake there?” “Oh, that’s a brown snake.” “And what about that smooth green one?” “That’s what we call a smooth green snake.”
Agreed! The “Little Brown Snake” though used to have the common name “DeKay’s Snake” from its species name, Storeria dekayi. That at least provided a bit of variety.
Once upon a time while I was leading a group of older ladies from an Audubon group on a field trip in the Everglades, we came upon the corpse of a small snake in the roadway. The poor creature had been run over repeatedly until it was little thicker than paper, and baked in the Florida sun until it was completely dessicated. I pried it up from the ground and it actually fluttered in the breeze. Despite its condition though, size and coloration left no doubt about its identity. However, nothing in my previous interaction with those good ladies prepared me for the doubt and derision I received when I told them that it was a Ribbon Snake.
I had a biology professor in college who regularly took our class for walks in the woods. He also happened to be one the nation’s premier herpetologists. He always told us, “One should take no more pride in killing a snake than one should take in killing a robin or a cardinal.”
Based on my own experiences, I sometimes wonder if copperheads and rattlesnakes are quite as rare in New England as most of these cites say. I personally ran into rattlesnakes twice last summer and once already this year (althought it probably doesn’t hurt that I live close to a place called Rattlesnake Mtn.). Also, when I was a kid, my grandparents had a wood pile in their backyard that attracted so many copperheads that my grandfather kept around a special stick that he would use to catch them so he could release them in the woods down the street.
The “Little Brown Snake” though used to have the common name “DeKay’s Snake” from its species name, Storeria dekayi. That at least provided a bit of variety.