The phrase "a rat snake" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a specific type of non-venomous snake belonging to the family Colubridae, often found in various regions.
Example: "While hiking in the woods, I spotted a rat snake slithering through the underbrush."
Alternatives: "a rat serpent" or "a colubrid snake".
The copperhead of India is a rat snake, Elaphe radiata.
There was my friend MacRae Dunn, an avid hunter and fisherman, whose last post on Facebook had had something to do with a rat snake.
Steen identified it as a rat snake, a "highly arboreal" species that climbs frequently, so it might have just been doing its regular thing.
(Ages 3 to 7) Images to contemplate: a bullfrog sitting on a lily with a ring in his nose; a tiger shark with stripes, claws and fins; a rat snake with whiskers and scales.
They didn't see any monkeys, though they did see huge black palmetto bugs, a rat snake sunning itself on the sandy path, long-necked white birds that Smokey Joe called ibises.
Nor is it the poses James puts him in: the boy Hercules, age 5, brandishing a rat snake "as thick as his own little arm," or the carnival man dazzling Burmese villagers just before his death, the sun "glinting penny-bright" on his goatee as he "free-handled the dangerous serpent they called ngan taw kyar ('royal tiger snake') with cool bravado".
When he returned, the birds were in a corner: a gray rat snake had slipped in and an enormous lump in its midsection was preventing it from getting out again — the second predator-death in the flock).
However such a scenario nearly played out for hundreds of passengers on board a Qantas plane in Sydney, after a Mandarin rat snake was found in the doorwell of a plane bound for Japan.
A 4ft (1.2m) rat snake nicknamed Kevin has been found in a toilet water tank of a home in Essex.
A California king snake was found late last year in a vacant store in Dublin, a 15-foot python turned up in a garden in Mullingar, a corn snake was found in a trash bin in Clondalkin in South Dublin, and an aggressive rat snake was kept in a shed in County Meath, northwest of Dublin, an area dotted with sprawling houses built during the boom.
A California king snake _____ found late last year in a vacant store in Dublin, a 15-foot python turned up in a garden in Mullingar, a corn snake was found in a trash bin in Clondalkin in South Dublin, and an aggressive rat snake was _____ in a shed in County Meath, northwest of Dublin, an area dotted with sprawling houses built _____ the boom.
