SNAKES EVERYWHERE!!

Click on pictures to ENLARGE!

We hit the walking trail yesterday and came across two baby snakes that we almost mistook for twigs. Yikes!
You should of seen us after that. Our eyes were glued to our feet watching each step we took.
Now fast forward to today and it gets even better.


We hit the trail, walked to our turning point and saw nothing...not one dang snake. Hmm, we were kinda hoping to see one again. (You know it's not often that we see snakes living here in town.)
We turned around and headed back to the truck.
Just as we came to the wooden bridge we got a big surprise...actually a lot of little surprises.
We stepped onto the bridge and immediately a little snake slithered out in front of us. 
We backed up and as I did I heard a bunch of noise coming from the grassy area just before the bridge.
OH MY!
There were snakes EVERYWHERE!
They were all over in the grass and leaves. Each one measured anywhere from 1 1/2 to 2 feet in length.  They were slithering up the little hill towards the walking path and then I noticed this writhing ball of nastiness. 

It was a huge tangle of snakes rolling around. (I'd guess there to be 15-20 snakes rolling around in that ball.)You could see more snakes coming up the hill and as soon as the reached the top they immediately shot over to the tangled mess and joined in. 
Eeeewwwww!
As I grabbed for my cell phone to try to get a few pictures I told Katie to watch my feet. Do NOT take you eyes off of my feet and yell as soon as you see one coming towards me.
I have never seen that many snakes in one place before so I was totally amazed. Oh and it made a pretty interesting learning experience for the both of us because we came home and hopped on the internet to find out what kind of snakes they were and when and how they mated.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

 We learned that they were just plain ol' Garter Snakes with red tongues which I thought was kind of neat looking.
Typically they come out of hibernation between May & June here in WV and soon after they go on the hunt for a partner to mate with. With the unusually warm weather that we've been having (80's today) the snakes have come out of hibernation early. The boy snakes tend to gang up on the females and when & if you find a ball of them all entwined like we did today more than likely there is one female in the center and all the rest are males. 


Now would you like to play find and seek and see if you can find the snakes? You will have to click on the pictures to enlarge them and remember these were taken on a cell phone so they aren't the best quality.
Look at the first picture and see if you can find them and then scroll down to see if you got them all right.

I found 4

Scroll

down 

to see

them!

While we were watching all the little ones on the ground there was a bigger one lurking in the tree.

                                  It was a blacksnake .
Here's one last picture and they've already been circled.

As much as I don't like snakes I have to admit that it was pretty neat to see all of those today.