nature walk

On Saturday, which was a beautiful, beautiful day, we went on a walk on the trails near our house, and it turned into a great nature walk. Soon after beginning down the trail, I saw an interesting looking stick partially across the trail. It had a lot of zigzags in it and tapered at the end. I was planning to kick it off the trail. Buuuut, Brian told me it was a snake. Which startled me a bit. And a dead snake at that. Just lying there, stretched out, but crinkly. He grabbed a stick to pick it up to get it off of the trail. He slipped the stick under the tail end of the snake and picked up 8-10 inches of it off the ground, but the snake soon slipped off the stick back to the ground. He slipped the stick under the tail end again, and to our surprise, the snake hightailed it out of there into the brush! Not dead after all. Yay snake! It was a black rat snake (they're not always crinkled like this one; I don't know that I've ever seen one crinkled before). I guess he was just sunning himself. We continued on down by the creek, where Brian tracked down a singing katydid (probably not just like this one). Also by the water, we saw probably the coolest thing of our walk — a red spotted purple (and the other side of the wings). If you can find any larger pictures of this guy, look at them because they are so pretty. Here's one that's larger. Continuing on, I spotted an awesome caterpillar. When he bended, we could see the beautiful orange between the black. He was probably 2.5 inches long with a diameter about that of a dime and friendly! Brian informed me he is a caterpillar of a great leopard moth, a cool lookin' moth.