Snakes

Lon spied this recently-shed snake skin while he was watering what passes for our landscaping.

This snake is over 5 feet long. Probably a black rat snake.

A closer look at the head. The holes for eyes were quite visible.

Someday I’d love to watch a snake shed its skin.

[Update early June: We now have a second snake skin of about the same size about 10 feet away from the first.]

Is this the same snake that doomed our old truck? David came across this snake skin when he was going to use our truck while we were in India, but Maria convinced him to leave it (the truck) alone. By the time I got back two months later, mice had taken over the engine compartment and I never could get the truck started again. Eventually, this truck was turned into NPR programming.

Reviewing my old photos, I find that I have pictures of black rat snakes almost every year. Maybe this snake explains why the baby bluebirds disappeared from their nest box earlier this week. Haven’t seem mom and dad bluebird around either.

David has other connections to snakes:

In grad school at Carnegie Mellon, David worked on snake robots.

The snake robots can climb poles and the inside of pipes.