CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- It’s one thing to see a snake outside, but it’s a completely different story when it’s slithering across your hardwoods while you’re watching television at night.
A South Charlotte mom was at home with her son Monday night when her Husky started jumping around.
“We both jumped up to see what was going on,” said Barbara Gillis.
That’s when they saw the snake on the floor in the living room. They grabbed a box to put on top of the snake and then used garden tools to get it outside.
Gillis said they took the box off of the snake to take a picture to help identify what kind of snake it was.
We sent the picture to Marvin Bouknight at Discovery Place Nature. He immediately knew it was a baby black rat snake because of its long skinny body.
When some people in the NBC Charlotte newsroom saw the picture, they thought it was a copperhead.
Bouknight said there are three distinctive ways to tell the difference and look at the three traits together:
- Look at the body type. A rat snake has a long, skinny body to constrict its prey. A copperhead has a noticeably thicker body.
- A copperhead has a triangular head. The head is much more pronounced and more triangular
- A copperhead has slits for a pupil. They don’t have round pupils. He says you can easily see the slits from 10 feet away.
Bouknight says baby rat snakes are “coming out in droves right now” around Charlotte. It’s that time of year when the eggs hatch.
“They can climb. They are trying to look for their own territory,” Bouknight explained.
Copperheads can’t climb trees. “You’ll see them on your porch and in mulch but you likely won’t see them in your hanging plant. That’s probably a rat snake.”
Bouknight said Gillis did the right thing to get the snake out of the house by using a box.
“The only thing a snake can do to protect itself is to strike and bite,” Bouknight said. His best advice is to use a broom to push the snake away so the snake isn’t so defensive.
The confusion with the copperheads is “all born out of fear for venomous snakes,” Bouknight said.
And it’s important to keep in the mind the difference between venomous and poisonous. Venomous means the snake has to inject you with the venomous. A poisonous snake is one you can touch and absorb the venom through the skin (like poison ivy).
Bouknight says the most common snakes in Charlotte are garter snakes, brown snakes and water snakes.
As for Gillis, she’s glad that the snake is out of her house, but she admits she’s worried about how it got inside in the first place.
“That’s the scary party is not knowing how it got in,” Gill said.
The family has two dogs and one cat that will hopefully keep an eye out if something comes slithering across the floor again.
