Snake on a Bridge

Snake on a Bridge

Yesterday Dada and I took a bike ride down to Town Lake after dinner. Our route took us over the Lamar pedestrian bridge, which goes across Town Lake.

As we were approaching the north end, I saw a guy taking a picture of what appeared to be perfectly ordinary bushes, but as we passed I saw that he was taking a picture of a large snake, stretched out on the concrete.

We stopped and went back to look at the snake.

This picture doesn't reflect the size, but it was easily 3 feet long, a fully-adult snake of the "not a cute little garter snake" variety.

Nobody there at the moment knew what type of snake it was but I knew it definitely wasn't one of the harmless varieties around there (black snakes, rat snakes, etc.) and looked like it could be a copperhead or water moccasin, both of which are indigenous to the Hill Country and both are water snakes.

The snake wasn't being threatening but I didn't get any closer than I had to for this picture (a cell phone picture, so I was stretching my hand out toward the snake's head).

I've done a little online research to see if I could identify it but haven't found anything conclusive. It's markings are like cottonmouth except that the colors are reversed from what I saw in the pictures on line. It's definitely not a copperhead, which has a more triangular head and different markings.

Anyone know what kind of snake this is?

Not being snake handlers we didn't didn't linger and rode off to see if there were any bats emerging from the Congress Ave. bridge (there were not as it was still a little early in the evening).

On the way home we rode past Jo's Coffee Shop on South Congress, where we heard rock music. We circled the parking lot to check it out and then I rode on, but Dada was all "I want to hear the music", so we went back and listened to a couple of tunes before heading on up the hill toward home. Dada is definitely a rock and roll girl.