Snake!

We have our first pet snake in the household 🙂

Now that the sun has come out – my son has been finding snakes everywhere.  He has been setting up little traps trying to catch them without any luck.  He found 5 yesterday, but I was too late to catch them – they had already crawled into the tall grass. 

Then we found this beauty…

I was a little surprised when I picked it up because I was expecting it to be a Garter snake.

Garter snakes are pretty boring looking…

 and this snake, with the vibrant orange underside, definitely isn’t boring.

When I was a kid, we used to catch snakes all the time, and we never caught a snake this cool!!!  I have fond memories of catching and keeping ‘pet’ snakes, so when my son asked if he could keep it as a pet my answer was yes!  First though, I had to figure out what kind of snake it was…

It turns out to be a Ringneck Snake.  It is a common snake, but is nocturnal and secretive.  

Thanks to Bindi the Jungle Girl (his first crush) he has excellent snake handling skills 🙂

The first item on today’s ‘to do’ list was to get an aquarium and set-up a snake habitat – complete with crickets, earthworms, moist dirt, moss, and lots of good hiding spots.

He/she/it seems to be enjoying the surroundings and my son is thrilled to have a ‘pet’ snake!