This one comes from just a few days over nine years ago, and while it’s possible that I have seen the same species once or twice since, I never got any usable photos of it, much less featured it here in a post. It was also misidentified then, but I’m not sure I’m correctly identifying it now.
Here’s the deal. Back then, I hadn’t found the useful source of identifying reptiles and amphibians for this area, which is this one, that I use all the time now. So my searches on rough description pulled up a likely match, that of a prairie kingsnake (Lampropeltis calligaster) – except that they’re not found in this area (kinda duh! really, when you think of the common name,) and presumably said source did not provide the active range. Since then, I have found one that does inhabit this area – and another. The descriptions and images, from any source that I’ve pulled up just now, do nothing to help differentiate them. So I am very tentatively identifying this as a juvenile mole kingsnake (Lampropeltis rhombomaculata,) with the recognition that it might instead be a juvenile eastern milksnake (Lampropeltis triangulum triangulum); the single row of markings along the lower sides favors the former, though.
Another source (not my preferred one above) also indicated that it might be a scarlet kingsnake (Lampropeltis elapsoides) and showed photos to match – except that these popped up under the scientific name for the eastern milksnake and clearly did not have the typical markings of the scarlet kingsnake, which is the species that closely resembles the coral snake, differentiated only by the order of the colored bands. I suspect they were trying to cover the ‘regional’ name for the snake, which can be all over the damn place, but it still remains incredibly stupid to have a regional name that’s identical to another species especially when their ranges overlap. This is not a scarlet kingsnake, by any stretch of the imagination.
It is also not a coral snake or copperhead, that some guides claim they’ve been mistaken for, which boggles the mind – both species are wildly different from either of the two possibilities here, so much so that “mistaking” them can come only from someone who hasn’t a fucking clue what they look like. Not surprising at all, really, and such “mistakes” almost always come from people who automatically consider all snakes dangerous and “bad,” but it’s still egregiously misleading to imply that this is a factor of close resemblance rather than just evidence of idiots who freak out over garter snakes…
Notably, the mole kingsnake, eastern milksnake, prairie kingsnake, and even the scarlet kingsnake are all from the Genus Lampropeltis, so little wonder than that three of them are almost identical in markings. They’re kinda like the Kennedys…