I often find these little guys in my garden (in Greenville, South Carolina) around this time of year. In this photo, this snake appears to be large, but these snakes are only about 6 inches long and about half an inch in diameter. I think it is just a brown snake, but many of the ones I find have a reddish color so I am not sure. Any ideas?
...and here are a few more of them. All of these seem a little more brown, but I think they are the same. One other noticelable characteristic is that the markings are heavy on the first half of the body, but fade off toward the tail.
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I'm genuinely stumped! @herpetologyguy might know, I dropped him a line to see if he could ID it.
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I do know what it is! It is a brownsnake, also known as a DeKay's snake! They do vary in color a bit but your best bet for identification is that they generally have a lighter stripe running down the back with paired black dots running down either side of the stripe!
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Awesome! Definitely going to be summoning you for more tricky reptile IDs like this one in the future!
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Thanks so much! I thought they were brown snakes, but the color variation had me questioning that. It is good to know what they are since we seem to have a lot of them in our garden. According the Wikipedia page for DeKay's snake, they "primarily feed on slugs, snails, and earthworms." That explains why I always find them when I am weeding or planting.
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Thanks! We'll see what he has to say.
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And he got it!
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