I find it a little amusing right now that, during the house closing thing when I knew we’d be busy, I set up several posts ahead of time to prevent any noticeable lapses in my posting “schedule,” but for the past month or so have had almost nothing to continue filling in, naively (or is that naïvely?) thinking that I’d be able to fill in here and there. It is to laugh. Seriously, I’m wondering when we’ll be done with all of this moving horseshit and I’ll be able to get back into a routine.
Also, for amusement, I’ll remind you that, almost two years ago, I’d speculated that we’d reach the 3,000th post by late September of this year; we are quite far from that mark and, unless things do a serious change for the better (which is not something to hope for when fall is settling in and the critters becoming less active,) we’re not going to hit that mark by the end of the year either. However, I might be able to squeeze out another podcast – I’ve had one stewing in my brain at least.
For now, we turn to the Just Once subject for this week, with the caveat that it might not have appeared just once anyway.
This is from four years ago, a yellow rat snake (Pantherophis obsoleta quadrivittata) – or at least, it was. Since that time, or somewhere near it anyway, biologists have changed the species – now it’s potentially considered a subspecies of the eastern rat snake, which itself has changed, and is thus Pantherophis alleghaniensis quadrivittata. Seriously, the number of times the scientific names of these related species have changed just since I started the blog is disturbing.
This session did mark the first time that I’d photographed (and handled) a yellow rat snake, however, having pulled it from a bluebird nest box at our friends’ house, where you can see that it had consumed several baby bluebirds. Our friend was not happy about this, but this is how nature works; rat snakes are really good about climbing things and detecting the scent of birds’ nests (and, naturally, of rodents as well,) and bluebirds have clutches of multiple young, sometimes twice a year. Natural selection keeps them working their own angles to survive.
A year later, we have the first (and so far only) example of the new nomenclature – maybe.
Quite a bit different in appearance, isn’t it? While I’m quite sure that it’s a variant of eastern rat snake, I’m not 100% sure that it’s the yellow subspecies, due to this coloration. The main species of eastern rat snake used to be called the black rat snake, which is more appropriate, and this is neither black nor yellow. I’ve heard that the two subspecies can cross-breed, which this might be an example of, or it might simply be a wider color variant of the yellow – snakes, many reptiles and amphibians actually, can have a lot of variation in their colors, meaning little. Since this was found on an island (albeit not a remote or significantly isolated one,) there remains a chance this is an island variant, able to be found only on Topsail Island, but I admit this is unlikely.
I have a brief video clip, too:
The scale of the first snake above is clear enough, but not this one, which was even bigger, pushing two meters in length. I had no qualms about handling it, but let it be, then regretted it when I discovered later on that I couldn’t find this color variant. I watched the same area for the next several days but saw no signs of it; I would have at least gotten a lot more detailed images of it, from all angles, underside included.
Well, I might’ve, anyway – The Girlfriend was the only other person available at that time, and she sure as hell would not have tried handling it, nor would she have gotten too close for nice detail shots either. I’ve done the one-handed thing with snakes for photos, and it’s quite challenging, to put it mildly. No, I don’t have any Xtreemkooldood head-mounted action cams or anything of that ilk, so that wasn’t an option either. But I would’ve found some way…