Snake!

Cool moment, terrible photo! Maya and Seth saw this snake in a friend's driveway last week. It hung around in the driveway, letting us get fairly close (well -- maybe close would be a bit of an exaggeration -- this picture was as close as I ever got) and watch it for a nice, long time before it headed off into the grass, where it was amazingly well camouflaged. We figured the picture might not come out well since I had to take it with my camera phone, so we tried to pay close attention to its features so we could look it up in the field guide when we got home. We couldn't quite identify it from our field guide alone but used the extension service's Kentucky Snake Identification site and then Google and Google Images to narrow it down. It turned out to be a rat snake.


Maya and Seth's excitement and interest remained for quite a while after we got back home:

Here they're looking at one of their favorite snake books/model kits, Uncover a Cobra.


Here's Maya, who can amazingly and quickly find anything she needs in her very full and often very messy room, playing with some of her snake toys. (I cannot do that -- I just see a sea of "stuff." But she's really good at spotting things in those hidden picture puzzles, too. Oh, and finding lost keys!)