The Wilderness at Home

This past week while hiking with my friends I asked them to be on the lookout for snakes, as snakes are one of my favorite photographic subjects, though I find too few around Austin or on the well traveled trails. We did manage to come across a few lizards on the hike, but no snakes were seen.


Until Tuesday when I was working in my garden.

You can see the rat snake top center if you look closely.

And there in my home mulch (along with turkey bones) was a lovely rat snake. Although I had a hoe in my hand, my first thought was not to chop its head off, my first thought was to run and grab my camera (which I obviously did).

A little closer to the snake.

Just the day before I had seen a mouse run into the mulch bin, so I should not have been surprised to find a rat snake in there. I am sure my various mulching and the mice it attracted kept him well fed.

After snapping a few pictures, I put on my gardening gloves and picked him up and checked him out to make sure there were no obvious injuries from being dumped out of a mulch bin and it seemed to be just fine, so I let him go at the far end of the bed, away from where I was working and he slithered off to find more mousey goodness.