Uno

We'd like you all to meet our latest critter, Uno! We found Uno while weeding in our garden today. He looked just like a piece of dried grass and only Catherine's keen eyesight alerted us to the fact that he was there. We caught him in order to take a closer look at him and instantly decided that, even though it's only Tuesday, "he" is definitely our nature find of the week. We actually aren't sure whether Uno is male or female, or even what kind of snake it is. We're pretty sure it's either a common garter snake or a ribbon snake, but because he's so tiny (only about as long as my finger and about as big around as a piece of string) and his markings are so difficult to make out, it's not easy for us budding naturalists to figure it out which one it is for certain. He definitely has the stripes of either a garter or ribbon snakes, but it looks like he has a white stripe in front of his eye, which I believe is more indicative of a ribbon snake than a garter, but it also looks like he may have some markings around his mouth as well, which ribbon snakes don't have. Right now the markings are no bigger than a pencil dot so it's really difficult to be sure. We'll be taking him to the local nature center later this week to see if anyone there can tell us more about him and help us figure out how to best take care of him. For now we have him in a tank with some moist sod and a few worms...and a fake log with some fake leaves that the kids thought he might like. You can see him resting in the leaves in the pic, so obviously they were right. He's really quite cute, don't you think?

The reason why we call him Uno, and the reason why I agreed to let the kids keep him rather than insisting that we let him go like I normally would, is because he only has one eye. Obviously, you're looking at his "good" side in this pic! The other side of his face is completely featureless and his mouth is somewhat deformed on that side as well, which suggests that he was born this way as opposed to being injured. It's doubtful that he would live very long in the wild, so I agreed to keeping him...at least for a while.

Because of Uno, we spent a good portion of our evening looking up snakes on the internet. We are most familiar with some of the more common snakes in our area because we see them frequently. We see garter snakes and ribbon snakes in our yard and the fields around us all the time, and banded water snakes on the lake and in the creeks around here a lot. I've seen a few black rat snakes and blue racers over the years as well, and we've seen a milk snake at the nature center, but that's about the extent of my knowledge of snakes in this area. We found out that there are some really interesting and beautiful snakes around here. Unfortunately, many of them are uncommon or endangered. We live in a place where there are no common venomous snakes, but I still warn my kids to be very careful about observing and handling snakes. Even if a snake isn't venomous, if it has a mouth it can bite!