Pet Forum

The California King Snake is such a neat pet snake. Let's talk about their range, habitat, what they eat, and more information on the California King Snake.

The California King Snake is smooth, shiny, with unkeeled scales. The head is barely wider than the neck. Highly variable in appearance. Most commonly seen with alternating bands of black or brown and white or light yellow, including the underside, where the light bands become wider. A striped phase with a white or light yellow stripe on the back occurs in coastal southern California. An unbanded phase with a dark belly and lateral striping occurs in the northern San Joaquin Valley and southern Sacramento Valley. A dark banded phase with a dark underside occurs in coastal Los Angeles County, some with a high number of bands. A desert phase occurs with dark black bands and narrow bright white bands. Some variants have much dark speckling in the light bands, others with much light speckling in the dark bands.

California Kingsnakes are active during daylight in cooler weather and at night, dawn, and dusk when temperatures are high. When disturbed, generally not aggressive, but sometimes vibrates the tail quickly, hisses, and rolls into a ball, hiding the head and showing the vent with it's lining exposed. A powerful constrictor, coiling tightly around its prey. Immune to rattlesnake venom. A popular pet snake. Many custom color phases have been bred, including albinos.

California King Snakes are found throughout California, except the damp redwood zone of the extreme northwest coast, and the northeast corner. Absent from high elevations in the Sierras, the Trinity Alps, and the Cascades. Rages north into southwestern Oregon, east into southern Nevada, southern Utah, southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico, and south through much of Arizona into Sonora, Mexico, and south throughout the Baja California peninsula.

Name: California Kingsnake

Scientific name: Lampropeltis getulus californiae
(Lampro= shiny; peltis=shields)

Range: West coast of North America; from the tip of Baja to southern Oregon, and west coast of California to desert areas of Nevada and Arizona

Habitat:desert, woodlands, chaparral, farmland, river bottoms, grasslands, deciduous and coniferous forests

Status:Not threatened

Diet in the wild: rodents, birds, lizards, frogs, snakes

Diet in the zoo: carnivore diet; furry mice and other rodents