and bugs. Mr. Cromer’s favorite snake is the hog-nosed

and bugs.

Mr. Cromer’s favorite snake is the hog-nosed snake, because if you bump him, he will bump you back. They can spread out their neck so that they look really fierce, and some people will say, “Hey, here’s a cobra!”, but it isn’t a cobra, it is only a hog-nosed snake faking it. If they see they are getting the worst of a fight they will play dead, just like an opossum does, and flip over on their back, because hog-nosed snakes believe all dead snakes lie belly-up. If you want to see if he is really dead, turn him over on his stomach, and if he is really alive he will quickly turn himself belly-side up, because he thinks that how dead snakes are!

There are about two thousand different kinds of snakes on our planet, but all these snakes fit into only five skin patterns. Hold up your hand and count them, your thumb would be the first kind, solidcolor snakes, like black snakes and green snakes.

Next would be striped snakes, like our little garden snakes, black or green with colored stripes running down their back.

Three would be the banded snakes, with whole bands of color that go completely around them, like a bracelet would. Two of the most common snakes are banded snakes, the coral snake which is deadly poisonous and luckily lives mostly in Florida and the little com snake which is harmless and lives around here.

Ron taught us how to tell them apart with a little jingle, “Red touches yellow, you’ll kill a fellow. Red touches black, you’re a friend of Jack.”

Next are the spotted snakes, and they have spots in random patterns, like the water snake and black snakes before they turn completely black. But the poisonous snakes, like the copperhead and the diamond back rattlesnake have definite pattern in the shape of diamonds or triangles or hour-glasses.

Mr. Cromer wanted us to see a specimen of two other kinds of reptiles, a box turtle