Black Rat Snakes

For a critter that's supposed to be so rare in these parts, I've certainly seen my share of them over the past few days. Today the count was four, and I had hardly covered much ground in between my work. The first one made my day, I was working in a cabin that has been mouse-free for about 6 years, then all of a sudden last fall they've found their way back in again. We crawled under the cabin, checked the pipes, checked the joints, all looked to be sealed tight. I even got out a trouble light last night after dark, put it under the cabin in a few positions, went into the cabin and shut out the lights and hoped that I'd see a glimmer in the pitch dark from light shining through a hole, but no luck. In one of my trips into the cabin today, here was a lovely half-size blacksnake coming across the counter, from a hole under the propane pipe to the stove. I picked it up, patted it on the head, told it what a wonderful creature it was to tell me how the mice were getting in, and set it loose back outside.

There were covers that I had placed over the couch and beds for the winter that needed washing, so I grabbed those and headed for the laundry room. As I was putting the covers in the wash machine, I heard something above, and saw a very large black rat snake up in the rafters. I gave it a gentle prod with a broom handle to see just how big it was, it moved around, looked to be 4 or 5 feet long. I left it there and went about my business. Around 7:00 p.m. I realized that I hadn't hung out that load of laundry yet, and headed for the laundry room, and heard a noise again. I saw my snake was still there, but then I saw 2 heads, and realized that there were 2 of them wound up together and moving about in the rafters, so I ran for the camera. When I got back, the two of them were hanging down the side of the wall, winding themselves up together and swinging back and forth. They didn't seem bothered by my presence, so I took pictures. After a couple of minutes one of them fell down behind the washing machine. The other one pulled itself back up and kept looking for the one that had fallen. The one that fell promptly started climbing up the pipes and wires in back of the machine, and started crawling up the corner of the wall. The first two attempts were unsuccessful, and I was thinking I may have to help this creature back up, but the third time it made a more determined effort and hauled itself back up to the rafters. They slithered towards each other and ended up nose to tail across the beam, then started winding together again, and once more were hanging nose down on the wall. This went on for a few more minutes, and then both of them fell onto the machine. They just crawled nose down in back of the machine and held on to the pipes with their tails. It was about then that I heard something rustling in the leaves outside, there was another smaller black rat snake, about 2 feet long, crawling along the ground. The two big ones were busy behind the machine for a few more minutes, then came crawling out across the floor. One of them then took off like a shot, crawled past me and went about 10 feet, then up the rockwall and back over to behind the building. The one in the laundry room crawled back up the corner and up into the rafters. It would have been interesting to grab the larger of the two snakes and try to measure it for size, but this was not the time to be interfering. Rather, I was cheering them on, telling them to be sure to produce a new batch of little mouse catchers. I got a measuring tape to measure the distance from the top of the taps to the top of the wall, it's 3 feet one inch, so I'm guestimating the larger snake to be about 4 1/2 to 5 feet long. Both of them looked to be mature healthy specimens of a large size.