Blind snake


While digging some soil out of the dirt mound to build Joyce some melon mounds on the caliche, I unearthed a blind snake.  It could have been a New Mexico blind snake or a plains blind snake.  If a NM blind snake, it was pretty far east of their normal range and if a plains, then it was north of its usual territory according to my Texas snakes field guide.  I think it more closely resembled the picture of the NM blind snake in the guide, being rather pink.  It was a feisty fellow and did its best to slither away but being only 5-8 inches long it just couldn’t cover ground all that fast.  And then there was that whole white cane and dark glasses business to further impede.

Sometime in the last year or so, Rebecca found a carcass of what appeared to be a blind snake in their driveway.  It had been thoroughly rendered two dimensional by vehicles but was still recognizable as a snake and not a worm, which the species closely resembles.  Other than that I had never seen one before, which is not surprising sense they spend their lives underground.  I guess the one mashed in the driveway tried to buck the system.