Fay and I were walking along Sand Beach Road around 6:30 this morning and saw this fellow at the edge of the pavement. He was so still that we feared he had been run over. We snapped a quick photo before we knew he was camera-shy, and he slithered away quickly into the tall marshy reeds at the edge of the public way.
The neck ring was absolutely clear, and the key to making this an easy ID even though I had never seen one before. As indicated in the attached drawing (from my sketch and enhanced in the style of Audubon by Google Gemini AI), the Northern Ringneck also has a brightly colored belly. We only saw glimpses of orange-red along the lateral scales as the snake motored out of sight.
This is the third species of snake I have spotted here on the island this summer — the other two are the common garter snake and the smooth green snake. Although there are about 2,700 species of snakes in the world, the Pine Tree state can only claim nine native species and none of them are venomous. As a journalist, I have heard rumors of a known colony of timber rattlers living on the Maine-New Hampshire border, but state officials say that the timber rattler — which once was native to Maine — is no longer in residence.
According to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, the Northern Ringneck lays its eggs in a communal nest in late June or July. So perhaps we saw a new mother-to-be traveling to or from a nearby nest.
References
filters:
and:
- date==this.date
- file.folder.contains("Periodics")
views:
- type: table
name: Daily Almanac
order:
- file.name
- forecast
- low temp
- hi temp
- precip
- wind dir
- max wind
- moon
- days-to-full
- sunrise
- sunset
sort:
- property: sunset
direction: ASC
columnSize:
property.forecast: 286