Brown rat snake or black rat snake?

I’ve been living in the woods for 35 years. A lot of my neighbors are snakes. I am puzzled by a reference in “Born to Hunt Snakes” in the May 13 issue of The Columbia Star: brown rat snakes.

Living in the Piedmont, we only have black rat snakes. As you inch toward the coastal divide, you can find yellow rat snakes and black rats overlap, and you can have hybrids occasionally. However, unless the brown rat snake you mentioned twice is a localized name for a hybrid (which are never brown) I have no idea what kind of snake you’re talking about.

Perhaps you mean a pine snake also called a gopher bull. While it will eat rats, it is not a constrictor and therefore not a rat snake.

Correy E. Mason

Editor’s note: In the article “Born to Hunt Snakes” in the May 13 issue of The Columbia Star , the brown rat snake referred to was, in fact, incorrectly named. The correct name is black rat snake.