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There are many different species of
king snakes and milk snakes in the United States,
but in DuPage County, we have the eastern milk snake. And its typically not as
brightly colored as this
as adults.
This one has a great deal of
juvenile coloration to it, so it makes it a bit of a unique animal.
If you find a juvenile
eastern milksnake in your neighborhood or on your property
or at a local forest preserve,
the juveniles do look a lot like this. But by the time they get older, they
start to take on the coloration
of a fox snake
whereas the ground color
or the color in between the saddles is a little bit more beige,
and the saddles themselves are
not as brightly
red in color or reddish-brown in color.
Many times, too, the milk snakes will have
a little "y" or a "v" on the back of their head
whereas this one has a single spot.
This snake is warmed up sufficiently now, and it's quite active. Normally, it just sits in my
hands,
but it seems to be interested in doing some exploration.
I don't want to put it down, because the first thing that it would like to do is
to get itself wedged into some
situation, where I probably would have a very difficult time extracting it from.
People enjoy seeing
the milk snake,
and many times they want to compare it to
the coral snake
or the scarlet king snake.
Everybody in this area anyway, in northern Illinois, has some
vague idea of the rhyme that they teach children in the south to avoid coral
snakes by
the colors in relation to one another,
the rhyme being,
"If red touches yellow," the yellow being a band
in-between its rings,
"if red touches yellow, it could kill a fellow.
But if red touches black, then venom lack."
Or, " friend of Jack,"
as ranger Jack would like to say.
So as you can see in our milk snake here, we've got red touching black,
and so that would mean,
"venom lack." It doesn't have venom. It's a nonvenomous species.
People ask,
"Well, does it bite? Does it?"
Just as any child,
or human being for that matter,
could potentially bite you,
these could potentially bite you, too. They have teeth, but their teeth are
perfectly suited to the type of prey that they eat.
And since they eat mostly smaller prey such as mice, voles
and other snakes,
they're teeth are suitable for grabbing that prey, holding it and constricting it, and then
swallowing it.
If you get a wild snake
irritated at you by simply grabbing it,
or taunting it, tormenting it,
you're risking getting bitten.
A bite from a snake such as this would probably result in little more than some
surface or skin abrasions.
Milk snakes don't get as large as fox snakes. Typically, if you find a milk snake,
that's 3- to close to 4-feet long,
that's a really good sized milk snake.
This snake is about three years of age.
About three years old.
And it is,
as you can see ,
little more than 2-feet-long
and quite slender.
But they typically don't achieve
a very large size
as far as snakes go.
I've seen garter snakes that are much heavier bodied for their length.
But usually when I find a milk snake,
it gives you the impression of its being slender for its overall length.