Smooth green snake Shutterstock While we spend a lot of time writing about birds here, it is always fun to get questions about other taxa, and especially to cover some basics of groups that are overlooked or under-appreciated. • Eastern milk snake • Common water snake • Red-bellied snake (Northern redbelly is a subspecies) • Ring-necked snake (Northern ringneck is a subspecies) • Smooth green snake • Eastern ribbon snake • Common garter snake (Eastern common, Maritime garter are subspecies) • DeKay’s brown snake • North American or black racer NOTE: Not all subspecies are listed This week, let’s talk snakes! If you have ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes, this article may not be for you (if you are even still reading) but hopefully if you make it through you’ll appreciate these remarkable reptiles a bit more. A question came in from a Bowdoinham resident, Deb W.
, asking about the identification of a snake, and, because she thought it might be rare, if the sighting should get reported. A good place to start is with the diversity of snakes in Maine: we currently have nine species, some with multiple subspecies occurring here, and there was historically a 10th, which has been extirpated. The “lost” species is the timber rattlesnake, which used to occur in southern Maine, but due to extreme persecution from humans hasn’t been documented here since 1860.
This was the only venomous snake in Maine; all the remaining nine species are safe to be around, al.
