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After doing some scale counts (upper labials), saddle counts, color comparisons, and comparing the counts to my bulls, she is definitely not a bull snake, but could be an intergrade/hybrid. I'm pretty sure she's probably a Sonoran Gopher or Sonoran Gopher x Bull. Her head is much more pointed than my bulls' heads are, and her rostral scale is thinner and taller.

Does anyone know of a site or book that lists more definitive scale counts for the different subspecies of pituophis?

I found a photo I took at last year's reptiles and amphibians demo/show locally, and it looks just like my snake in color and pattern. Been trying to get in touch with whoever had that snake, as they might know what it is Maybe I'll run into them at the show again this year.

-cat
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My collection and herp photography

www.lowergroundreptiles.net

W.P. Mara's book on Pine snakes.

Mike B

Hi -cat,

if it becomes more difficult, I use Klaubers or Stulls works of the 30'th, not Mara .

Ther are some details like interspace between the blotches and further.
I look for it this (German) evening

Bernd
www.pinesnake.de

Here I have some orginal extracts of Klauber 1947 Cassification and Ranges of the Gopher Snakes of the Genus Pituophis in the Western United States:
In the paragraph -Key- he wrote this:

70 BULLETIN 22 : ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY 0F SAN DIEGO

Sayi-affinis : Sayi usually has black anterior blotches, affinis brown, although this is often not true of the former in the southern part of its range. Sayi is more heavily and darkly mottled below, and the streaks which mark the labial sutures are more prominent, this being especially true of the infralabials. In sayi the interspaces between the anterior dorsal blotches are narrower than in affinis (Bernd-D: Stull 1940: sayi 1-4 scales interspace), and the scales comprising them are usually dark forward and light behind. This gives a peculiarly characteristic speckled effect, different from that in affinis, wherein the interspace scales are often longitudinally streaked along their keels.

Maybe this can help sometimes and the form and size of the rostal-scale...

Bernd

pinesnake.de