Debbie,
Congratulations to you and your husband on your cute boy.
God bless you all. On the id of the snake,we hope to hear from our reptile expert who is none other than manature
herself but let me warn you,manature gets upset when some one
kills one of her creatures.
Enjoy parenthood and your garden !!
Felix

I'm sorry to hear of the snake's demise, but I do understand that it is easy to panic when a snake is inside the house and you have a little one. For future reference, this was indeed a harmless banded water snake, and would not have posed any kind of problem to you at all.

The main reason you can tell it wasn't a diamondback is...no diamonds! The eastern diamondback rattlesnake has very plain diamond shapes on it, rather than bands of color like this one had. Here is a picture for illustration.

You can clearly see the diamonds running the length of this snake. Also, don't forget that most of the time diamondback rattlesnakes have RATTLES. Not always, as they can get broken off. But usually. They are heavier bodied than the banded water snake, and the rattles look like a series of buttons at the tip of the tail. In this picture, the rattles are black, but visible.

One more picture of a diamondback, showing the diamond pattern, and the rattles. (The tail is held vertical in the center of the coil of this snake, with the tan rattles at the tip.) Notice, also, how really FAT the tail of the rattlesnake is, in comparison to the long, thin tail of the banded watersnake.

Your son is darling, and in order to ease your mind if you run across snakes in your house or yard in the future, I highly recommend you learn to identify the very few venomous snakes we have in Florida. In central Florida, that would be two kinds of rattlesnakes (pygmy and eastern diamondback), coral snakes, and cottonmouths (also called water moccasins). They are not very hard to learn to ID, and then if you see a snake that is NOT one of those four, you know it is harmless and can be caught & released, or "swept" out the door with a broom.

If you want more info on easy ways to ID these snakes, let me know, and I'll share some past posts and photos that should help.

Marcia

I've been a Florida outdoorsman for many decades and I've seen a lot of pit vipers in the wild. They always have one thing in common which aids in their identification. Whether it's a six-inch baby cottonmouth or a six-foot diamondback, they always have that dark "line" running from their eye back along the jawline to their "neck".
Now, the coral snake is a different matter. But every pit viper I've ever seen had that stripe. Once you learn to look for it, ID'ing them is easy.

And yes , juvenile black racers are also commonly mistaken for poisonous snakes .
Here is a great link with pictures :

Here is a link that might be useful: Commonly Encountered Snakes

Thank you, all. Those are some great links. I thought about all Marcia's wonderful posts and wished I had committed them to memory, but the only things I could remember, well, I couldn't remember well enough: he wasn't slender as a racer or ringneck... no pupils... head looked triangular...ish. We noticed he had no rattles, but he looked young (DH said "there's no button" but I didn't know what he meant) and he could have lost them. I could just see the markings enough for them to look like diamonds. I couldn't see the red coloration at the time or that would have helped. Arrgh.

Really, if I had run across this guy outside, I probably would have run for the camera.

Thank you again, and Marcia, your posts really do help -- I did think about it and knew chances were he was harmless. I just couldn't have slept -- or played in that room with the baby -- without being certain.

Debbie

The cheek stripe in mocassins is especially easy to spot, in any coloration. But ONLY in Florida. Mocassins in other parts of the US do not display that stripe as prominently, if at all, so that ID only works for the Florida cottonmouth, which is a distinct subspecies.

I've done very comprehensive (long, with lots of photos) ID's on cottonmouths, eastern diamondbacks, and coral snakes (the easiest of all to tell apart from their non-vemonmous look-alikes). I will bump the coral snake thread to the top, and see if I can find the cottonmouth one. The diamondback thread disappeared from the archives, apparently, but the photos above should be helpful, since diamondbacks look exactly the same from birth to old age. (Unlike moccasins).

For me, the stripe on the head of the diamondback is harder to see with the rest of the pattern, and it resembles an eyemask rather than running the whole side of the face. The cheek stripe on the cottonmouth is much more prominent, due to the cream areas above and below it, and is the best way to recognize a mocassin in Florida.

The coral snake is easiest of all. No need to remember the order of color in the stripes of a red, yellow & black snake. The coral snake is the ONLY one in Florida with a black nose. That's it. The harmless mimics ALL have red noses. You can see it at a glance.

I will try to find the more comprehensive ID posts and bump them up for anyone interested.

Marcia

Not to worry, Debbie. I don't blame you at all. While I hate to see harmless snakes killed, I understand the feeling of having one INSIDE the house that you don't recognize, especially with a baby around. That's a lot different than bashing in their heads in the garden just because "all snakes are bad."

Again, I will try to put the snake posts to the fore, and you can take a look at them again or print them out for future reference. Once you have those committed to memory, at least you will know you don't have to panic when you spot something that doesn't match them.

Marcia

Yep, Florida Banded Water Snake. Honest mistakes happen. Regretting the mistake without beating yourself up over it, is a healthy attitude.