Sorry for the double post, but it's too late to modify my last one. the dna study of western garters came to some startling conclusions. Most notably, this one:

"...some populations of a given
morphologically based subspecies are more closely related
to populations of another subspecies than they are to other
populations of their own subspecies. Furthermore, even
the colour pattern characters (e.g. head colour, the width
and colour of dorsal stripes, background colour, the
presence of lateral stripes, and ventral pigmentation) on
which the subspecies descriptions are primarily based
(Rossman et al. 1996) do not hold up under scrutiny."

So, it is possible that the so-called fitchii that look so much like concinnus, aren't fitchii at all. They could be more closely related to sirtalis than they are to other fitchii populations, or not related at all to either one. Even though the study only dealt with sirtalis, ssp. it does raise the question, and more possibilities. It also raises the possibility that the mostly orange headed Benton County, OR concinnus are more closely related to fitchii, or another subspecies of sirtalis, than they are to other populations of concinnus, such as the clark Co. WA population. Fascinating.

I know I'm way behind on snake news and such, but I just now realized that the CA king has been crossed with milk snakes, resulting in what the pet trade calls "jungle corns". I didn't know it was possible. Even more surprising is that the hybrids are often fertile. Scary. To me that suggests that the ca king and milk snakes are not seperate species at all, but are instead subspecies of the same snake, only separated by geography and morphology.