Thanks for sharing these Russell. I produced these snakes. Just to clarify, the 2010's were pure Newton County, IN locality animals and the 2011's were pure Jasper County, IN locality animals.



The isolated island of sand prairie near the Indiana/Illinois border encompasses parts of Kankakee County in Illinois, as well as Newton and Jasper Counties in Indiana. You can find bulls that look basically similar in all of these areas with the "tricolor bull" look (basically dark near the head, light in the middle, and dark near the tail) being the dominant color phase. This is the look that has typically been associated with the "Kankakee bull," though you can find snakes that look exactly the same in Indiana. A few animals tend toward the darker side and occasionally exceptionally dark animals pop up. We have seen more of a tendency toward dark animals on the Indiana side, especially in Jasper County, though this is not a hard and fast rule.



Bull snakes do readily crawl across the artificial delineations that humans call county and state lines. A friend of mine reported seeing part of a DOR bull snake in Indiana and part of the same snake in Illinois, possibly carried there by a bird. We have also heard of bull snakes crossing roads on state and county lines. That being said, we have kept our locality lines pure to the county level to this point.



Last year, we had the opportunity to breed an exceptionally dark pair descending from Jasper County, IN. We marketed the offspring as our "Black bulls." These have not been line bred for generations, so there is still some variation in the babies and some may still end up a little lighter than the parents, while others may actually be darker. Our goal is to select for the darkest ones over the next few years to refine the "Black bull" look.
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