The kingsnake

During a midnight in August 2007, my Dad went up to his garage/office area: while he was there, he heard a slithering noise; he turned a light on only to see a snake. Dad went into his office to use the intercom to contact Mum in the house to ask her to ask me what type of snake had black, yellow, and red bands on it.

I was already awake at the time, and when Mum described the snake to me, I cried out "It's a kingsnake!", and rushed out of bed, put my robe on, grabbed Mum and Dad's camera, and went up to the garage. I was excited because it was the first real kingsnake any of us had seen and I did not want to miss it (the two previous "kingsnakes" we had seen were fakes, as one was a stick mistaken for a kingsnake, and the other turned out to be a lie).

By the time I got to the garage, the kingsnake had got under the fridge/freezer up there. Dad wanted the snake out of the garage, so he carefully tipped the fridge while I looked under it: the kingsnake then slithered onto one of the thin metal bars on the bottom of the fridge and hung itself on it. I took a picture of this, but warned Dad not to put the fridge back down or else he would likely harm the snake. The kingsnake got off the bar on its own, but it then slithered off into a part of the garage where it would be too difficult to find it at such a late hour.

Twenty-hours later, the kingsnake was still in the garage, and this time we all went up to look at the snake, and also to get it out of the building. We managed to get it into a bucket and took a few pictures, then we went outside to find a gopher hole the put the kingsnake down. I carefully reached into the bucket to handle the snake, but when I tried to put it down the gopher hole, it resisted by moving its head away every time. What did not help was that the snake was covered in a nasally unpleasant mucas, making it difficult to hold.

In the end, we took the snake away from the vicinity of the garage and house and let it go. I was fortunate that the kingsnake did not bite me nor even make any attempt to bite during my handling of it, though due to my limited experience of catching kingsnakes, I did not know if this was their standard behavior or a snake that did not mind being picked up.

Here is one of the pictures taken of the kingsnake:

Finally, in regards to looking for kingsnakes, remember this: "Red touch yellow, kill a fellow. Red touch black, venom lack." Why? It is very easy to confuse the harmless kingsnake with the highly-venemous coral snake. If the red bands touch the black, it is a kingsnake, but if the red bands touch the yellow, it is a coral snake. Fortunately, we did not get coral snakes in our part of Oregon, but this is still an important tip to follow and remind oneself of.