A fellow field herper from Southern California contacted me a few months back and said he was going to be in the Boston area in mid July and was interested in seeing some native snakes in the area, milk snakes being one of the targets he’d like to photograph. The heat of July is not a great time to find milk snakes up here, but I told him I’m always up for taking a hike with the kids to see what we could turn up. We had a little rain the evening before we went out and was hopeful that it would help as we had just been through a heat wave for the few days before. Not 5 minutes out of the cars I had one of the kids flip a piece of a small wooden fence post and to our (well my) surprise was this little guy. Success!
When we were going back to the cars about an hour or so later the kids wanted to check if the milk was still there and it was. Since we left it had shed from about the midpoint of its body down, with the old skin still remaining from the head to the midpoint. This was the first time I had ever seen that. It was explained to me that it was probably a result of us handling it just prior to shed.
We continued on and I took him to a spot where we have found a handful of adult easterns this year in this rock crevice. Here’s a photo that I previously photographed of the crevice.
My daughter peeked into the crevice and said there was a big milksnake in there. She was right, but unfortunately it was too far into the crevice to get a photo. What was interesting was that my guest took a peek into the crevice and then asked me if I had ever found a green milksnake? This adult definitely had a green hue similar to this one I flipped last year.
I made a return trip just before sunset and the milk was still deep in the crevice. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some shots of that one in the near future.
We went on to have a great day and find a bunch of other stuff including frogs and toads in various stages of development, garter snakes, rickneck snakes, and this gravid redbelly snake.
My guest said to me “Why don’t you take it home for a little experiment with the kids?” I don’t like to take many things home because then the kids want to take everything we see home, but I decided to take this one home and set it up until the babies were born. I explained this to the kids and they agreed. A week and a half later I got a phone call while at work from a very excited young girl trying to explain to me that the mommy redbelly had her babies! WOW are these things small at birth.
This morning it was time to release mom and her babies back to where mom was found. Of course my daughter and I had to flip a few things when we got there.
Here is a group shot of what we found. I had to put them in the delicup that I had the redbellys in to be released in order to get them all in one photo.
I wanted to take a photo of the yearling eastern milk with the baby redbellys to show just how small they were.
It was a good idea until this milk decided he was a little hungry, lol.
One parting shot just before we headed home.
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Joe
