The eastern diamondback is very rare now in NC. A friend of mine has a research program on the snake here in NC, and I spent lots of time helping him. We waded swamps and trekked dry pine forests, and found seven diamondbacks in three years. Four of these were on Camp Lejeune, two in a Pender County pine forest, and a huge six foot two inch monster in Scotland County.
The timber rattlesnake occurs in two races, one in the mountains, which has wide bands on the body, and can be yellowish to even nearly black. South and east is the race called the canebrake rattler. The patterns on the back of this snake resemble chevrons.
I have seen timber rattlers of the mountain race in Surry, Wilkes, and Ashe counties. I have found canebrakes in Davidson, Montgomery, Moore, Richmond, Scotland, Pender and Onslow counties.
The tiny pygmy rattler is found from Mecklenburg County east to the coast.Populations of this tiny rattler are fragmented in the western coastal plain.
One way to tell the two timber rattlesnakes apart is that the canebrake has a brown/orange dorsal line down the back, and also dark stripes on the jaw line beneath the eye. These features are faint or lacking in mountain timber rattlers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj8OxHrVk0k
First video is the canebrake rattler. Lowland timber rattler/
Second is the mountain version of the timber.
Last edited by Devilwin; 04-14-2020 at 08:51 PM.
My dad used to have some sayings that cracked me up. The one about snakes that I posted and this one regarding snakes, He would say, I'm only afraid of two kinds of snakes, live ones and dead ones. I remember when I came home from serving in the Army, one of our neighbors had passed away while I was gone. When he told me about his passing, I asked innocently did he die? My dad said, if he didn't they sure played a cruel joke on him. But the best one was when he said I wouldn't trust so and so in an outhouse with a muzzle on. I believe he was talking about a politician but I'm not sure. He was a world war 2 veteran and a no nonsense guy, so some of the things he said surprised me.
GoDuke!
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I’d never seen one of these until recently—got my attention (I live in Louisiana).
HUGE WOW!! That's so cool! I've only seen one scarlet king snake that was caught from captivity (here in NC), and have never seen a coral snake.
That is definitely the latter. Hope you (or whoever took the pic) let it be. What an awesome discovery. They are both very secretive. (But only one can make your day very bad.)
FYI, coral snakes are the only member of the elapid family in NC, and North America. Related to cobras.
http://www.wildlife-removal.com/snakecolorrhyme.html
Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."
I saw two coral snakes under a piece of tarp in some woods my cousin owns in Shallotte. We let them be. The Green Swamp borders his land, and has more cottonmouths than any area I've ever seen. On one of our rattlesnake treks, we counted 23 cottonmouths.