??????Rhabdophis tigrinus

I had to take some time off work the other day, and so had some rare daylight time for myself. I went for a walk in the mountains to enjoy the spring sunshine and cooler air. While I wasn't looking for snakes, I knew the conditions would be good for them, too, so I brought a camera.

Recently I had been talking about eyesight, Lasik and the overwhelming greenness of spring colors around here (so much that I am going to lower the camera's saturation from the winter settings). An article that I found recently discusses the evolution of primates' eyesight considering our forested origins, and how we may owe our visual acuity to evolving in proximity to snakes. Hmmm.

During my walk I noticed the scent of a snake, quite strong, so I looked around and found this one:

Although well camouflaged, it was very easy to pick him out in the brush... now we might know why!