Corn-ucopia of colours

So in the last corn snake post I mentioned Elaphe guttata's spectacular range of colorations and I thought before I forgot it'd be worth doing a comparison post. So here's the one I featured last time again which is just a beautiful specimen:

This is the first one I found (which is why the shots are less good, I was still getting my snake shooting eye in as it were). You can see its much deeper in both the reds and yellows and just generally bolder in its pattering.

The black margination around the red rosettes is a lot clearer too. I really liked this one and wish I'd got better photos.

And then this last corn is completely different again. Unfortunately there are no attractive close-ups of this snake either as it was already dead on the road which was a heartbreaker. A really pretty snake and it can only have been hit a few minutes before I came along (when it would have been escorted off the road to safety whilst I took nice photos of it).

As you can see this snake has no yellow in it but rather a kind of tawny-grey. A completely different look again.

Most regions across the south-eastern USA have their own corn "look" - they vary tremendously even within a small area as this post shows (these were all found within a mile of each other) but tend to have a similar look. Snakes from further north or east than these would look rather different again. Pretty cool eh.