The Cornish Milk Snake

I have a friend that called one evening this past week, I'll call him Joe. Joe is a former Biologist that has defected from the "Science of Life" to Physics- the "Science of...Boring Stuff". OK, I'm sorry, that's not fair. I am probably a bit negatively biased about physics because I believe the only reason I passed physics in High School was because Mr. Steele, my teacher, let me clean his blackboards for extra credit. Seriously.

Back to Joe. Joe found a snake on his closed back porch. More correctly his wife found the snake and Joe came to the rescue. He then put the snake in a bucket and called me, leaving a message about his dilemma. He still has enough Biologist left in him that he was interested in what kind of snake he had and according to the results, he would release it in the proper place the next morning, far from his home. I called Joe back and asked some details about the snake- I found out it was small (about 12 inches), had a skinny silverish body with darker patterning, and, according to Joe, a large head. I told him, without seeing the snake, and knowing where he found it, it was likely a Milk Snake. I told him to look it up on the Internet in the morning and if he didn't want it out before morning he should put a lid on the bucket, because they are good escapists. He said, "that little guy isn't going anywhere."

Next day I get an email telling me the snake got out during the night (imagine that!) and that, after Joe's Internet research, including viewing some video on YouTube, he concluded it was a Corn Snake. I emailed back and told him Corn Snakes are not in this region of the US, but they look a lot like a Milk Snake. He proceeded to conclude that his incredible powers of observation and the reliable YouTube video made him sure the snake was a Corn Snake, and it was probably someone's pet that got away. I tried to convince him to TRUST ME and that the LIKELIHOOD that it was a native snake was much higher than it being a non-native pet snake. He mentioned that maybe because of the changing weather patterns the snake's range had moved this way...

So ok, it got out of hand. And because his poor wife was included in all of these back and forth emails, she, to make the madness end, concluded that the snake was likely a hybrid that Joe discovered named the Cornish Milk Snake. Sure, ok, I can go with that. I think it is just as likely as Joe's pet-snake-released-got-onto-his-porch-via-global-warming theory.