Yep, it’s here already – time flies, eh? Tomorrow is World Snake Day, so we know all readers (the definitions of “all” and “readers” subject to wild interpretation) will be out combing their local areas to see what can be found. I already have my fallback, should I not manage to locate something specific tomorrow, but I’ll certainly be trying and know several likely places to check. And if I were superstitious, I’d say I just jinxed myself, but really, I’ve spent a lot of time on this property specifically looking for snakes to familiarize myself with what’s in the region, and have to admit that most of my finds have come when I wasn’t looking. So, I can go out and pretend to be paying no attention – will that work, or does that actually count as still looking?
The above pic, by the way, is not a recent find but actually over two decades old, the first snake that I have in my digital stock and thus hailing from Florida. It’s a grumpy eastern racer (Coluber constrictor,) not at all happy about having been captured and handled and, after release, keeping an eye on me. I’m wondering what the oldest snake pic that I have is, quite possibly something on print film negatives, but I’m not going looking for it right now – maybe tomorrow if I fail miserably on finding a current one.
Meanwhile, the one below (a smooth green snake, Opheodrys vernalis) is the oldest that I have readily available, dating from 1998 or ’99 (the same era as these,) but that was still slide film. It served as my computer desktop wallpaper for a little while, and at 800 pixels wide, only marginally smaller than what I’m displaying here (750px.) Wow.
