What’s brown, tan and sticky? The bad news? One unfortunate eastern milk snake. The good news? Jack Herman from Mauch Chunk Lake Park to the rescue! He received a call about a snake trapped on a glue board meant for rodents and insects. Jack received the call because he is known locally as the person to call to rescue snakes in various situations.

Glue boards are trays coated with an extremely sticky adhesive. Often used to get rid of rodents, insects and other small pests. These boards are often used as an alternative to snap traps. Animals that touch a glue board are immediately caught and stuck to the board and usually suffer a slow death by starvation or suffocation.

Available at grocery stores, home improvement and hardware stores as well as over the internet, they are an easy solution for getting rid of pests. Manufacturers of glue boards don’t claim that the traps kill the pests. In fact, they suggest that boards be thrown in the trash with live animals still stuck to the surface. As a result, animals continue to suffer, starved and exhausted.

It’s difficult to release an animal from a glue board without running the risk of inflicting further injuries to the animal or getting bitten by the animal while trying to help it. The safety of the person helping with this sort of situation is just as important as saving the trapped animal. Even if an animal appears unharmed, it could have injuries that aren’t obvious. Any released animal from a glue trap is most likely suffering from dehydration or exhaustion.

The other good news? The staff at CCEEC knows how to remove all sorts of animals from these sticky traps. Anyone who finds an animal trapped on a glue trap should put the animal in a box if they can do so safely and bring it to the center.

So, what was the milk snake doing in the office building? Just like we seek shelter from the weather, so do other animals, and that means ending up places that they shouldn’t be, like under a desk in an office building.

The eastern milk snake is one of the more common snakes found in Pennsylvania around houses and outbuildings. Eastern milk snakes range from southeastern Maine to central Minnesota, south to Tennessee and western North Carolina.

Eastern milk snakes are small and slender snakes. Adults have three to five rows of brown or reddish-brown blotches down the back, while young milk snakes tend to have red-brown blotches. The body is gray to tan, while the belly exhibits a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. Adults measure from 19 to 35 inches in length.

Eastern milk snakes and northern copperheads can be distinguished by a few basic characteristics. The head of a copperhead is copper-colored and never marked while the milk snake’s head has the light “V-” or “Y-shaped” mark. The copperhead’s head is wide and triangular with a narrow neck; the milk snake’s head is narrow so much so that it’s difficult to see where the head ends, and the neck begins. The copperhead has only one row of crossbands down its heavy body in contrast to the milk snake’s three to five rows of blotches down a slender body.

Milk snakes occupy a variety of habitats, including farmland, disturbed areas, meadows, river bottoms, bogs, rocky hillsides, and coniferous and deciduous forests all providing much-needed cover and prey as these pretty little snakes are great “mousers.”

They feed mainly on mice, but will also take other small mammals, other snakes, birds and their eggs, and slugs. They are constrictors, which means they use their long, strong muscles to subdue and kill their prey.

Adults breed in June, with females laying clutches of six to 24 eggs in loose soil or rotting logs from mid-June to July. The eggs incubate for a period of 42 to 56 days with hatchlings emerging in late August to October. The young that emerge are brightly colored, but the color dulls as the snakes age.

Milk snakes are secretive and often go unnoticed as they spend most of their time hidden under logs, boards, rocks or other debris. They seldom bask in the open and are active at night. When first encountered, they either remain motionless or attempt to escape. If thoroughly disturbed, they may vibrate the tips of their tails rapidly and strike repeatedly.

One of my very first snake calls involved a distraught caller who said he had a copperhead in a bucket at a gas station. Not wanting this situation to escalate, I met him, and I was fairly confident what he had in the bucket was not a copperhead. When I peered into the bucket, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief at the sight of a terribly upset milk snake looking up at me. It was in full defense mode with both ends working to scare me off. I was sure I nearly gave this gentleman a heart attack when I reached into the bucket to take the snake off his hands.

As for the rescued milk snake it is off the glue trap and just needed some time to rest, recover and possibly get some food before being released again.

Jeannie Carl is a naturalist at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center in Summit Hill. The center rehabilitates injured animals and educates the public on a variety of wildlife found in the area. For information on the Carbon County Environmental Center, visit www.carboneec.org.