Native Plant Wildlife Gardening

I like snakes. Snakes eat things I don’t like so we tend to get along just fine. I have no rats, mice, overabundance of crickets, leaf hoppers or slugs. What I do have is an indigo snake, rat snakes, crowned snakes, a hognose snake and the pride of my habitat, a king snake. Yesterday I accidentally uncovered a small brown snake Storeria dekayi (that would be the species, not the color) in a pile of leaves and he was pretty unhappy to see me. I however was thrilled to see him. It’s the first time I have seen one on my property. They are a small species which only grows to be 6″-13″ long and since their diet is primarily soft bodied invertebrates, he’ll keep the slug population down for me. A brown snake in the garden is a friend in the garden.

This particular species is frequently killed when misidentified as a juvenile copperhead. From a terrific site, Snakes of Georgia and South Carolina comes the following:

In many suburban areas Brown Snakes are killed when they are mistaken for Copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix); however, Copperheads have prominent hourglass-shaped bands and have bright yellow tail tips when less than 12 in long.

Please be aware of this if you live in an area with brown snakes. A copperhead juvenile looks very different in comparison to a brown snake but people seem to have difficulty looking past the pattern. If a small snake does not have a yellow tail tip, it is not likely to be a copperhead so please don’t kill it. Here is a young copperhead from another good site, Kentucky Snake Identification:

Also the brown has a typical, narrow non-venomous snake shape to it’s head.

Normally if I find such a creature I leave it be, not bring it into my kitchen for a quick photo shoot but I wanted to show it to the neighborhood kids. After a bit of show and tell, my new friend – and he is my friend, although I was not his at all – was re-released exactly where I found him. We named him Felix which didn’t impress him a whit. Hopefully Felix won’t be disturbed enough to put himself in the relocation program and move to another yard because I’d like him to stick around and provide natural slug control.