Another Visitor To The Garden

When Princess and I emerged from the back door for our afternoon walk yesterday, she started pulling me toward the steps up to the driveway.  I stopped suddenly and pulled her back when I saw this:

I held her back long enough to get a good look at the big snake stretched out along the bottom of the steps and make sure it was our friend the gopher snake and not a rattlesnake.  Sure enough, its head was narrow, not triangular, the body was slender rather than thick, and the tail was long and pointed without any rattles, so I determined that it was a gopher snake and let the cat proceed with her walk.

Princess jumped up on the garden wall beside the garage to get her daily ration of the wheat grass we've planted there for the cats to nosh on.  I'm not sure she had even seen the snake snoozing there in the shade of the steps, but I kept looking back over my shoulder to see whether it had finished its nap and started moving toward us.  I knew it was harmless to humans and cats, certainly a cat as big as Princess would not interest this snake, but thought I'd better keep an eye on it anyway.

I also kept a tight grip on the leash because I didn't want the cat to decide to mess with the snake, either.  These snakes are beneficial; they eat the mice and rats that devastated Cindy's lettuce crop last year, so I was happy to see later in the afternoon that the snake had finished its nap and gone about its business.

Here's a link to my blog post from last summer with a description of the differences between harmless gopher snakes and poisonous rattlesnakes:  http://plantagarden-itllgrowonyou.blogspot.com/2019/07/good-snakebad-snake.html.