ThatÂs an interesting thought, Wayne. However, the snakeÂs scales are keeled. Brown snakes have keeled scales, and racers donÂt, according to the UMass site. (And I just learned something new about snakes, thanks!) A couple of other details: this snake wasnÂt all that fast, and also it and another very much like it were both hanging out under leaf litter, which sounds like the preferred habitat of brown snakes. It is the same snake in both photographs, by the way. :) The bucket picture was insanely orange, so I tried to fix the color of the photo. I keep calling it an "eastern" brown snake out of habit, but IÂm starting to think I misremembered the name I learned as a kid. I guess itÂs just a "brown snake". Another website: http://www.uga.edu/srelherp/snakes/stodek.htm Here is a link that might be useful: UMass snake ID site

Thanks for the inputs. I've read in some forums that cedar is harmful to pet snakes. As for snake repellent, I did get some at Houston Garden Center and put it under the garage door where the little (if you can call 2 feet little) brown snake liked to get and haven't seen him since. On the other hand, it left a shed the last time I saw him and that may be why he was in there in the first place. Clint the Snake Man is coming by tomorrow to take a look at the property and give some suggestions as to what to cut back and what not too. I think I'm going to just start weed-eating everything in the back yard rather than trying to keep it landscaped. We live next to a nature area which is cut pretty close and have a power line easement on the other side. We do have some copperheads around but I've only seen one and it had evidently died of dehydration. I grew up with them in Tennessee and have had dogs bitten by them, but they would usually just "tree" any snake and bark at them until someone came. We had a lot of Bluejays around and they would start hollering whenever a snake got in a tree. It seems to me I've seen chicken snakes (rat snakes in Texas) in cedars but that was a long time ago and I'm not sure. By the way, I understand that the supply of antivenom for coral snake bit is nearly exhausted and the supplier doesn't make it anymore. Clint tells me that there is a good one in Mexico but it hasn't been approved by the FDA yet so the only option for a person bitten by one is to put them on life support until the venom has passed.

Carol, thanks for your input! When my BF saw the pics, he said the same thing - salamander. I don't know how I didn't see the legs while I was watching it "slither" around the dirt but he saw them in the picture, like you did. (Well, yes I do know how - my sunglasses aren't bifocals!) But I insisted it had scales and its' tail didn't taper so dramatically. He said maybe it's a skink and we went to the link you posted, actually. Sure enough, we found him, in the lizard section. He's a ground skink. What a cute little thing! I thought skinks were like snipes - make-believe animals to tease people with, but now I know they are real and happily living in my yard.

Baby Rat snakes all have blotches on a lighter gray background. As they grow, depending on the subspecies, the coloration changes, except for the Gray Rat Snake, who keeps the baby pattern for life. Black Rat snake turns black with age (yours is a Black Rat), Yellow turns yellow with four black stripes, Everglades Rat Snake turns all yellow or orange with a suggestion of stripes, and Texas Rat gets even heavier blotching. Timber Rattlers are rarely found in trees, always have a rattle (unless the tail has been cut off), even when tiny (at least a "button"), do not have "diamonds" or blotches, but "chevrons" (like sergeants stripes) down the back. Their adaptations do not include tree climbing, as they are a "sit and wait" predator, being heavy bodied and slow, waiting beside animal trails and tagging a small creature when it strolls by. Rat Snakes will actively pursue food, climbing trees to get to bird and rodent nests, going into burrows to find rodents, and even going into houses in search of rats and mice. This is why birds get all upset when a snake is in their tree. Rat Snakes, curiously, have a flat tummy with belly scales that can flatten out and grip bark and inconsistencies in wood, climbing quite as well as a squirrel, though slower. I had a pet Black Rat snake that I would put on a pine tree, and when I removed him, he would pull bark from the tree.