Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I was at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina this past weekend on a fishing trip...unfortunately the fishing was very poor, but we did get to see a lot of wildlife including several snakes. We saw some cottonmouths and a beautiful eastern hognose that was black with red rectangles on its back (unfortunately it had been hit by a vehicle and killed.) We also saw this snake...I didn't get a real good look at it, but thought I knew what it was. But after looking at the pics when I got home, I'm not completely sure. What do you all think? This pic was taken right next to the sand dunes at ramp 45, for those familiar with Hatteras.

hognose
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2 tham radix
1 Chicago Tham s. semifasciatus
2 elaphe vulpina
1 gray tiger salamander
4 Aphonopelma hentzi
1 G rosea
1 Haplo minax
1 Brachy angustum
1 Brachy sabulosum
1 Brachy vagans
1 Cent. hentzi scorp

It's a pretty poor grainy, low-res photo, but from the short robust body shape, keeled scales and pattern remnants I can just make out, it does seem to be a melanistic form of Eastern Hognose. They can be EXTREMELY variable. They can range from very vividly colored and patterned, to a very solid black, or anything intermediate of this.

I have personally captured a solid black(melanistic) Eastern Hognose in Ft. Pierce, Florida as I was getting off I-95 that looked just like the one in this photo below.

~Doug

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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

Thanks DMong! I didn't think it could be a hognose cause of how large it was (appeared to be over 3' in length.) I didn't realize they got that big but I just looked it up and the Virginia record is 44.5"!! My original picture is of much higher quality but I had to resize it to be able to upload it. Is there a way I can add the full size photo? Also, here's a photo of the poor fella that got run over

That's a big hognose, even if there are bigger records. I've seen a lot of Eastern Hogs and I don't think I've ever seen a three footer.

Is there a way I can add the full size photo? Also, here's a photo of the poor fella that got run over

Here's your full sized image -

The KS.com photo gallery automatically resizes the image when you post it here. You can get around that by removing the "-med" text from the end of the file name.

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Chris Harrison
San Antonio, Texas

Thanks Chris, that definitely made it larger! The version I uploaded though is still much lower quality (166KB in size) than my original file on the computer (which is a 1.55MB image.) I know there's a way to load a pic directly to the message (You see it done all the time in the Field Notes & Observations Forum with large numbers of large pics) but I don't know how to do that.

Here ya go. On the forums I post multiple pics with captions underneath them all the time like you mentioned. It's as easy as pie once you get the hang of doing it a few times.

Posting pics/mutiple pics

The best way is to go create a totally FREE account with a photo host site such as photobucket. This will only take a couple minutes to do, and you can store MANY gigabytes of photos there.
There are a few different ways to post photos, or multiple photos from photobucket, but the absolute EASIEST way is to simply go to your album once you create one there, then when you put your cursor on any photo there, you will see a drop-down menu come down underneath it. go down and "left click" on the bottom box marked "IMG Code", then just simply go into the normal text field, right click and paste it in the text field on the forum where you would normally do all the typing.

It will look like a bunch of weird text jargon, but when you hit the "post message" button....BINGO!, there it is.

You can leave little spaces in between pics with your "enter" key on the keyboard to type in captions etc.. as well.

You can do this with as many pics as you want, or of any size, but. They re-did their site format, and somewhere on there you can even limit all the phots to better fit 15" monitors, 16" moitors, etc.... Generally speaking, if the photos are about 1000 x 750 or smaller, they are more easily viewed by people so they don'y have to scroll around looking at HUGE photos that are much larger than the monitor.

All the image bracket nonsense is all done for you when you do it like I mentioned, it is as easy as pie really.

One suggestion though. To prevent any mistakes from actually being posted, I strongly suggest that you check things out and click the "Preview Message" button to see exactly how it will look to the forum viewers, then you can save the embarrassment of posting screw-up's multiple times like so many do..LOL!

Good luck!

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

Again, thanks DMong!

Here's the full size picture

Here's a cottonmouth I saw the next day in the same area

You're welcome!

Yep!, looks like you figured it out okay..LOL!

When you first saw the snake in the first photo, did you think it might have been a very dark(melanistic) example of the revered Outer Banks kingsnake?..

I was fortunate enough to have mine breed this year, and the female is now VERY gravid indeed!

~Doug

Here is my aberrant/striped male

smaller male "backing-up" the other aberrant/striped male to help ensure a fertile clutch.

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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

When I first saw it, I thought it was another cottonmouth! I've seen nearly solid black ones in that area before, and I saw a cottonmouth for sure just minutes before this one, I just couldn't get my camera out in time to take pics, so this time I focused entirely on getting a pic before it got away! I'm not one of those that think EVERY snake I see is venomous, but everything I've seen good enough to ID there has been a cottonmouth...during the summer there's usually a new one dead on the road about each day, which is a shame! It wasn't until I got home and looked at the pic on the computer that I knew it wasn't a cottonmouth. My first thought was that it might be an Outer Banks kingsnake (which got me excited) but I knew it just didn't look right, so that's when I decided to post the picture here. Thanks for all your help with IDing it and everything! I was very hesitant to consider hognose because of how large it was (the picture really doesn't do it justice!)
Those kingsnakes of yours are beautiful!! I hope one day I might actually see one of those down there (fingers crossed!)

Compare your two photos -

Can you tell which one is 166kb versus 344kb?
If not, why post the extra 178 kilobites?
It just slows down the download time.
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Chris Harrison
San Antonio, Texas

Why, I can tell a big difference, cant you? Just kidding; what I was trying to do was post my full size photo, but it looks like size is now limited on kingsnake.com? I've looked through pics before that people posted and you would have to scroll around just to see everything they were so big, but I don't see any like that anymore. Only reason I wanted to do that was so you all could see the details better.