Juvenile black racer?
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Juvenile black racer?
It's an older Northern watersnake. They get darker the older they get and before they molt. Check out photo #4 in the link for one about the same color.
https://www.paherps.com/herps/snakes...n-water-snake/
I stopped going for evening dog walks without a flash light.
Came across this one night. (No flash used to show how difficult it was to see)
https://i.postimg.cc/XN2y9vxB/20170911-195140.jpg
Here it is with flash
https://i.postimg.cc/fyky8x5t/20170911_195209.jpg
Well...it's the rodent eating kind (and fish, and salamander, and frog....), but so are rattlesnakes and copperheads. So I don't rightly know what's left to be the "shooting kind".
There really isn't any legitimate reason to shoot a snake in PA, provided that it is outdoors. We don't have Black Mambas that will chase you down and bite you. As long as you keep your head up and pay attention to what's around you, even our poisonous snakes will crawl away from you. Now if you have a license to kill a rattlesnake on a hunt, that's different. But I spend a lot more time afield than most folks and, even in known high density rattlesnake terrain, I've only ever bumped into one snake in my whole adult life.
Perhaps things are different way down south in the bayous cottonmouths, but it ends up that much of the time, the snake that gets called "cottonmouth" or "water moccasin" the most is the nonpoisonous Northern watersnake that we're talking about above. So there's little need to pull out a Bond Arms derringer loaded with .410 shot shot shells to finish it off. Either walk around the snake or get a stick and shoo it away.
I'm 1,000X more afraid of the ticks and related diseases that mice and other rodents carry than any old rattlesnake. Keep the snakes around to keep the population of reservoir hosts down.