This stunning snake is Carolina, a young female PALMETTO CORN SNAKE (Pantherophis guttatus). In the wild corn snakes are found across the eastern and southeastern USA with North and South Carolina (hence her name!), Florida, and Georgia being just a few of the states in which they are commonly found.
I used to keep and breed corn snakes in big numbers many years ago (mostly in the 1990s before I owned a digital camera!) but the ones I kept back then did not look like this particular individual. Corn snakes exist in a huge range of colour and pattern forms (known as morphs), some of which are found in nature and others of which have been created by decades of artificial or selective breeding in captivity. The Palmetto corn snake is an unusual colour and pattern morph which occurs in small numbers in nature and is becoming increasingly popular within captive snake collections. It is unusual because snakes of this type hatch as white to pale pink snakes with just a little colourful speckling on a few of their scales, but as they grow the speckling becomes more widespread and much more vivid in colouration.
The pictures above were all taken in late 2022, whereas the ones below were taken on the day I collected her in October 2021 when she was a lot smaller and a whole lot less speckly!
Carolina hatched in Kidderminster in Worcestershire on July 9th 2021 and I am very grateful to the breeders, Wyre Forest Reptiles, for letting me buy her! They produce large numbers of corn snakes among other snake species at a very impressive breeding facility, which I had the pleasure of visiting to collect Carolina in October 2021:
https://wyreforestreptiles.co.uk
I am also very grateful for their kind permission to allow me to share the pictures below. This first image is of Carolina when she was just three weeks old – you can see that she had almost no speckling at all back then and in particular her head was entirely white!
Photograph courtesy of Wyre Forest Reptiles
This picture was taken in October 2022 and her head is almost unrecognisable from how it looked when she first hatched 15 months earlier – not only is it now covered in red speckles but there are lots of yellow ones showing through as well!
Carolina’s father is in the picture below and he is a Palmetto corn snake himself – in my opinion another strikingly beautiful snake with his pure white background and distinctive red/orange speckling, although I do believe that his daughter might be turning out to be even more vibrantly coloured than her Dad!
Photograph courtesy of Wyre Forest Reptiles
This is Carolina’s mother – her colouration and pattern are far more typical of many wild corn snakes (albeit with very little black outlining to the red blotches) but she is carrying the genetic material required to produce a Palmetto corn snake which is why the combination of this particular male and female was able to produce babies like Carolina!
Photograph courtesy of Wyre Forest Reptiles
I am very much looking forward to seeing how Carolina grows and changes in the coming months / years and I will be sure to share updated photographs of her on here.