In many areas where once common, the smooth green snake, Opheodrys vernalis, seem to have become hard to find. In various areas where I have searched - Michigan, Massachusetts, Virginia, West Virginia, South Dakota, and New Mexico among them - in locales where the taxon was known to have once been fairly common, I have often failed to find any. I may have found only one or two after extensive searches.

Jake, who grew up with smooth green snakes common on the family property in Maine looked long and hard for the last several years, finding none until in 2014 when he found one - just one.

The last ones that I saw were in the Black Hills of South Dakota (a single snake) and then, while returning to Florida, I found two examples in Missouri. The Black Hills example was beneath a recently fallen dead tree trunk of moderate diameter in a blueberry flat. The Missouri specimens were beneath pieces of cardboard at the edge of a pasture.

A friend who visits Wisconsin on fairly regular intervals has found this little snake to still be common in Door County, a peninsula jutting eastward into Lake Michigan. Not only is the smooth green snake still common there, but it occurs in at least 2 color phases, the typical leaf green and a gray-green.

And as I write this I'm thinking that it is long past time for me to visit Wisconsin.

And just as a "by the way," smooth green snakes, known to be insectivores (perhaps arachnivores would be more accurate), have proven to be difficult to feed, delicate captives that are best left in the wild.