Yellow rat snake?

[muzixman]

I was reading this and thought yellow rat snakes had strips is this right or what kind of snake do you think it was?
http://www.bangornews.com/editorialn....cfm?ID=421823

[Bry]

Hard to say without a picture. Yellow ratsnakes hatch with blotches, but they develop into stripes as the snake gets older. At 4-5' it should be fully striped already. Two possibilities are: 1) they have the wrong species, or 2) the yellow rat never fully changed over to stripes. I have a black ratsnake that never turned pure black and is now at about 4.5', so that's always a possibility.

Bry