Snake Skin

Snakes are a part of living next to the woods. All of the snakes I have seen have been small and harmless so far, but I've seen a fair number- or at least the evidence of them. I've bent over to pick up a stick from the cement pad next to the garage, only to have it suddenly flex and slither away.

I've come upon shed snake skins in beds of ivy, in the grass, and in the loft of the hay barn.

I nearly stepped on a snake that had stretched itself along one of the wooden steps leading from the garage into "the stone room" (an old breezeway that's been converted to living space) as I carried in groceries. (The garage door had been left open for a few hours.) I've found their leathery, soft eggs when moving bricks from the gigantic pile the previous owners left. 

But it is still unnerving to come across small ones suddenly... or to come across this.

This is a snake skin... a long snake skin of substantial size, trailing from a previously unnoticed hole in the limestone wall of my garage. It's about two inches across and I can see maybe two feet.

It stretches from the opening, down to the ground, and along to the pipe on the right hand side of the picture. That end is large and open, maybe the head end? But there is nothing that looks like a head. It's probably a rat snake that was after a field or deer mouse that entered that hole. Or maybe it was just a random snake seeking a cool spot on one of these never ending triple digit/ninety-plus days. But a snake in the wall of my garage, which attaches to my house, is not cool. Yug. It's bad enough to know that we get the periodic mouse that we have to deal with. Again, that's a fact of country life. But snakes in the walls of my house?  

I'm hoping it was leaving at least, and not shedding as it entered. One of these days, when it isn't so brutally hot, I'll make an effort to go out there earlier in the day and gently pull the skin out so that I can see if it is possible to determine if it was going in our out, and if it was a dangerous one. But so far I have passed this skin for three days at dusk, on my way to the barn to close up the goats, and haven't had the gumption. 

The only dangerous snakes I have to worry about here are copperheads and timber rattlers. They are pit vipers. I've already taught my oldest two children to avoid them and how to identify them if they can't. As I mentioned at the bottom of this previous post, my children go out in tall rubber boots with instructions to step onto logs and then down- instead of simply stepping over them, to never reach under a log or into a hole or cave without prodding it first with a good, long stick.

According to a post I stumbled upon from a pest control place, you can tell if a snake skin is from a rattler or copperhead by looking at the scale pattern on the underside of  it behind the anus or ventor. If there is a double row of scales, then you're in the clear, if not, you have a venomous snake on the loose nearby. And of course, if there is a tail tip to the skin, you can automatically rule out a rattler. I'll let you know what I turn up, but if this close up is any indication, the answer doesn't look good.