I keep a Candoia carinata carinata in a terrarium and he does wonderfully but then again this species is from the pacific islands around New Guinea so the humid environment inside the terrarium is just what the snake wants. It is always best to design the enclosure around it's inhabitant and their natural habitat. You should not create a tropical rainforest type environment to house a temperate snake species but try to simulate an environment that the snake would feel comfortable in. Corn snakes are very easy to care for but they do get quite big in adulthood. If you are planning on getting a baby snake you need to keep it in a small enclosure to monitor it's feeding etc. and then move it up to a larger enclosure once it is not so small. Many European reptile keepers house their animals in terrariums/vivariums but it is still fairly new here. When growing live plants you really have to plan on the eventual size of the plants involved or they will outgrow the terrarium or not grow well. You might want to try Kingsnake.com for info on the different snake species that are available and which one would be good candidates for keeping in a naturalistic set-up. Mike

Hi Wayne. I was pretty sure it was a Milk Snake. The odd thing about it was the pattern, which is so much more like the "Intergrade" Milk Snake shown on plate 30 in Conant and Collins 3rd edition, or really like a Red Milk Snake. It was awfully large too; I have seen Milk Snakes, and they were rather smaller and had more of the pattern shown in the plate for the plain old Eastern (from the Boone area, collected by Wayne Vandevender). I am wondering if the "Intergrade" happens outside the Mid-Atlantic, and if we have them, or if it might be a rather odd color and pattern variation. Oddly, for all the years I have been catching and chasing snakes (probably over 50), and to live in Milk Snake range, I had never seen one. I saw your page Wayne. A neighbor of mine was proudly talking about her son killing a 5 foot rattlesnake, and I just walked away; I hope she heard me cussing and saying that the snake wanted nothing more than to live another day, and did not want to run into an ignorant human that just liked to kill things (he air guns squirrels and pigeons in the neighborhood; he was talking about air gunning Woodpeckers, and I offered to turn him in - federal crime! HAHAHA!). Ah well, we can only do what we can do...

That is indeed a Black Chinned Red. I had a few of them in the past that I legally collected (with permits) in Cades Cove. Compared to regular Reds they are darker with more spotting. Dave

It really wasn't very big -- probably less than 2 feet long -- I just zoomed way in from about 6 feet away. The following website seems to say the slit pupil and the dark hourglass pattern that is narrow along the back and wide along the sides are key distinguishing features. http://www.virginiaherpetologicalsociety.com/venomous-look-a-likes/copperhead-look-a-likes/copperhead.htm