Apparently quite a few of you knew them but by the common name of grass snake. I grew up just 8 miles from where I now live and spent most every moment in the outdoors in the later 1940s and all through the 50s, and loved the wild creatures so much that i went to school for many years so i could spend my life working with them, BUT I never saw one of these snakes until just a few years ago. There were surely none on the farm where I lived as a child. On my place here today, we also have another small snake called the Northern Red Bellied snake that I also never saw as a youth. Perhaps the period immediately after WWII with all the newly discovered chemicals was a tough time for living things in ag land.