Northern Water Snake

Nerodia sipedon sipedon
(Linnaeus 1758)
Montgomery Co., Missouri. Spring of 1974.

My first water snake of any kind was found along a gravelly farm creek in Missouri. N. sipedon are wicked biters, as I was to find out personally; they can bite and hang on, leaving numbers of teeth in your skin to be pulled out later with tweezers. In high school my friends and I visited a certain creek in near St. Louis, where these snakes were plentiful, and beautiful. They prefer to hide out in logjams, where leaves, branches and other detritus would mass together and provide a basking platform and cover at the same time. Occasionally we would find them under large flat rocks or debris along the bank, especially the juveniles. Pictured is a Nerodia sipedon sipedon from Jefferson Co., Wisconsin.

My Flickr album for this species is here.

HerpMapper records for this species are here.

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