VIDEO: Brown Snake Devours Python!

Brown snakes usually eat mice, frogs and lizards, so this guy must’ve been really hungry to turn on its own kind.

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The name brown snake refers to two different genera of snakes, found on two different continents. If you are in North America, brown snake is the common name for Storeria, a small, shy, nonvenomous snake.

If you are in Australia, Papua New Guinea or West Papua, brown snake is the common name for Pseudonaja, a genus of highly venomous snakes that includes the Eastern brown snake, considered the second most venomous land snake in the world.

According to Live Science, in North America, “brown snakes are small, slender snakes and are typically brown to reddish-brown or gray in coloration,” said Sara Viernum, Wisconsin-based founder of The Wandering Herpetologist. They have “two parallel rows of dark spots bordering a light stripe down their backs [as well as] pale venters with small dark spots along the edges.”

North American brown snakes are petite, ranging between 10 and 21 inches [25 to 53 centimeters] in length, said Viernum. “Juveniles have a yellowish collar around their necks and are usually darker in coloration than adults with a faintly spotted back pattern.”

These harmless brown snakes are often mistaken for copperheads and killed when they are spotted in suburban areas. Brown snakes and copperheads have quite different coloration and patterns, however, according to the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory.

Copperheads have distinctive hourglass-shaped bands on their backs unlike the more subtle black spots of a brown snake. Juvenile copperheads have bright yellow tail tips, whereas juvenile brown snakes have yellowish neck rings.

Brown snakes spend a good deal of their lives underground or under rocks, leaf litter or logs. They mostly venture out in the evenings or at night, when they are sometimes seen crossing roads. They leave their hideaways during heavy rains in the fall and spring, according to James H. Harding’s book “Amphibians and Reptiles of the Great Lakes Region.”

Brown snakes hibernate during the winter and sometimes share dens with other small, nonvenomous snakes like garter snakes, red-bellied snakes and smooth green snakes, according to Harding.

Some predators of brown snakes are birds of prey, larger snakes, large frogs and toads, weasels and domestic cats and dogs. “They are shy, secretive snakes but when threatened they will flatten their bodies to appear larger and release a musky fluid from their cloaca,” said Viernum.

“Brown snakes are not venomous,” emphasized Viernum; humans have nothing to fear from them. They use their forked tongues to collect chemicals from the air that they then “smell.” Since they hunt primarily underground and in the dark, brown snakes rely heavily on this sense to find prey, according to the ADW.

Brown snakes eat food that is easily accessible both underground and out in the open. They are prime predators of slugs, snails and earthworms and play an important role in controlling the population of those animals. They are also known to eat salamanders, beetles and soft-bodied grubs.

Their teeth and jaws are specially adapted to quickly and easily pull snails out of their shells, wrote Harding.