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<\/a>My husband spotted this Red-lined Ribbon Snake, Thamnopsis proximus rubrilineatus<\/em>, basking on the water return pipe of the water garden, near the stand of water iris at the head of the lily pool.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The first time I saw one, I was nine, and my mother and I were resting near a low-water crossing.\u00a0\u00a0 A beautiful little snake, graceful and harmless…it became my favorite snake that day.\u00a0 (It’s now my favorite small, slender, aquatic snake…other snakes have found their place in my list of favorites.)<\/p>\nT.p. rubrilineatus<\/em> is a shy creature, and in all the years I’ve tried, this is the first time one has held still long enough to get several mostly-good pictures.\u00a0 Snakes aren’t easy to photograph in whole because of their shape–you can almost never get the whole snake in one picture, all of it in focus.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This particular species, being shy, usually takes to the water and swims into cover before you can do more than grab a single (in my case often blurry) shot.\u00a0 So I crept forward very slowly, easing out the zoom telephoto, while the snake eyed me warily.\u00a0\u00a0 It was a partly cloudy day, and the snake was (as it prefers to be) in the shade of vegetation as well…so exposures were long enough to be affected by unsteady hands, and most were blurry.\u00a0\u00a0 It wasn’t quite dark enough to trigger the flash, except once<\/p>\n I enlarged the head, to show the beautiful patterns of color and scales:<\/p>\n <\/a>I find I can see more from photographing critters and then enlarging the images in the computer than I can with aging eyesight alone:\u00a0 that little pale crescent in front of the eye, and that white spot on top of the head…never noticed that before.\u00a0\u00a0 Incidentally, the pipe the snake rests on is less than two inches in diameter (probably about 1.75 inches.)<\/p>\n After I inched closer, and the sun broke through, the snake decided it had had enough of that giant eye coming nearer (these snakes are preyed on by herons, among other things.\u00a0 A big staring eye means you’ve been seen…and there might be a beak somewhere.\u00a0 Or a paw with claws and a mouth with teeth.\u00a0\u00a0 Bullfrogs take the smaller specimens of this species.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It began to move down the pipe toward the water, but much more slowly than usual…so I got more images:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n