Garter Snake, Henne

On my walk today, I ran into an old friend at the Henne Preserve and in the course of chatting about the local birds, the Red-headed Woodpeckers in particular, he told me that he'd spotted an Eastern Ribbon Snake which had been sunning itself on the main trail. This shy, but rather common close relative of the Garter Snake, is more slender and has a longer, thinner tail than its better known relative, and it's especially fond of shallow water areas, like the very refuge we were in. A couple of days earlier, I'd photographed what I figured was a Garter Snake that was also sunning itself on the footpath, but the more I thought about the reptile, the more I realized that I wasn't sure how to tell the two species apart. Ignorance sent me to my collection of field guides as well as to the myriad image banks available on the web, and these taught me a sure-fire, if fairly obscure, field mark: look at the serpent's lip scales. The Garter has a variety of dark marks on its scales; the Ribbon Snake has clear lips. I brought up the image I'd taken and enlarged it—a Garter, indeed.