This is a new one for me: last night, accompanied my wife to the rural stable where she keeps her horse. I have on occasion been called on to do snake removal from the barn (lots of mice there) and two riders called from the nearby indoor arena that "there's a snake in here!" I got my hook and bag from the car and found a 3-3.5 foot black rat snake lying atop the rail that runs around the inside of the arena -- perfectly still, with his (her?) entire body tensed into what looked like spasms . . . the kind of s-shaped muscle contractions you see when a snake is moving a new meal down into his gullet. As soon as I touched him with the hook he relaxed, appeared to wake up and started moving normnally. So I hooked and tailed him into the bag and walked him about 100 feet into the tree line for a simple release. Question: is this sort of tensed-all-over something you have seen in rat snakes, or was he sick? He was lying on a flat surface, not climbing.
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Odd rat snake pose
MikeinOKC
Aug 02, 2007 09:00 AM
Replies (1)
FR
Aug 04, 2007 09:34 AM
Not odd at all, not for ratsnakes or most snakes. Snakes make choices. They can either flee, if they think they can make it to safty, or go cryptic, and hope you do not see them. In these cases, when in the open and theres nowhere the snake can make it to, so they go cryptic.
heres a large male greenrat doing that. I have pics of many many types of snake doing this. Cheers
