There are a number of things that will stop a man in his tracks and cause him to pause and re-evaluate his situation.

I encountered one of those things this evening in my backyard while going to get my hose…

There it was lying next to the side of the house. A long length of snake skin. My immediate reaction was to look down at my naked feet, followed quickly by an inquisitive scan of the surrounding area. Somehow I felt vulnerable. I didn’t know how old the skin was and where it’s former owner might now be residing…

While I was going over various explanations in my mind, I rustled up the tape measure from the garage and grabbed the camera. This guy looked to be of a fairly decent size, and I wanted to see just how long he actually was.

That’s pretty close to four and three quarter feet long. That’s no baby.

A reassuring thought came to mind that perhaps the skin had blown into the yard from somewhere else, but the right hemisphere of my brain quickly noted that:

• The snakeskin was laid out straight and not in some curled up position that one might expect after being blown around by the wind.
• The head end of the snakeskin was lying behind some piping and wiring, as though it was left there, not blown by some random wind (as highlighted in the above picture).

The coloring of the snake appears to be a solid light brown with a darker brown stripe down its spine.

I tried doing some brief research online to try and identify what sort of snake it might be. This proved more difficult than I had imagined, because a) Its hard to tell the color and patterning of a snake from its skin alone, once it is out of it, and b) it seems that a lot of snakes with the same name have wildly different colorings and markings. That aside, I think its either a coachwhip snake, a cottonmouth snake or a brown snake (personally I am leaning toward the last).

I’ve not really got anything against snakes. I handled cobras etc when I was a kid in Malaysia where street handlers would come around and put on snake shows. My parents told me that a snake on my grandparent’s farm killed my boyhood dog. I nearly stepped on some sort of a water snake as a teenager (except a mate was walking ahead and to the side of me and scared it off). I used to have dreams about snakes chasing me and no matter how fast I ran I could not shake them off. But those are all idiosyncrasies. Ultimately, I feel a snake has just as much right to be here as anything else.

But in my backyard?

It gives you a creepy feeling. You know its there somewhere. And you just hope you don’t stumble across it while minding your own business and piss it off.