But watch out, corn snake owners — these elegant serpents are skilled at escaping from their homes.Snakes at higher elevations tend to be browner, reports the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.Herpetologist Jeff Beane, collections manager of amphibians and reptiles at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, described corn snakes' back markings as "dark-margined red or brown mid-dorsal blotches and smaller lateral blotches on a ground color of red, orange, brown or gray.".These corn snakes are able to angle their scales outward to make them better at catching and digging in to the bark's rough surface.Well, snakes use their scales and body muscles to climb narrow crevices on tree bark, new research finds.Sadly, corn snakes are often mistaken for copperheads and killed in the wild, according to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.Without legs, snakes must get creative to slither up trees, and new research suggests they use the scales covering their bodies to make such climbs.Their scales and body muscles work together to push against the bark on the tree as they inch upward, the researchers said.According to Beane, corn snakes are probably most common in the longleaf pine forests and flat woods of the southeastern United States.They range, however, "from the New Jersey Pine Barrens south to the Florida Keys and west to the Mississippi River.".He also pointed out that a subspecies known as the Great Plains rat snake can be found from the Mississippi River to eastern Utah.In cold climates, corn snakes seek shelter in stump holes, mammal burrows or other subterranean refuges, Beane said.During the warmer months, corn snakes slither into abandoned buildings, invade rodents' burrows looking for prey, and sometimes even climb trees, according to the Smithsonian Zoo.Beane said that corn snakes "often seek refuge under sheltering objects such as logs, boards and sheet metal.".First, they bite the prey to get a firm grip on it, and then they quickly wrap their muscular bodies around the victim in tight coils.She lays them in rotting stumps, and in piles of decaying vegetation or other places where there will be enough heat and humidity for the eggs to incubate.When born, babies are 10 to 15 inches (25 to 38 cm) long and are patterned like adults, according to Herps of North Carolina.According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, they can live up to 22 years in captivity, though their life expectancy in the wild is less.While the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) — a partnership of several agencies in the United States and abroad — has not adopted the new taxonomy, other organizations, such as the Animal Diversity Web and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), have.The IUCN states, "We retain this species in Pantherophis, following Utiger et al
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