This was at one time among the most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystems outside of the tropics. Longleaf pine forests once covered nearly 150 million acres and swept through nine US states, from eastern Texas to southern Virginia. That's in part because the indigo snake is inextricably linked to the ecosystem in which it evolved. But as is so often the case in wildlife conservation, things aren't quite that simple. At first, conservationists thought they could re-establish the species in Alabama simply by rounding up some snakes from other places and releasing them into southern Alabama's Conecuh National Forest. In 1978, the species was classified as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act. Though the indigo snake hangs on to existence in southern Georgia and some parts of Florida, it has vanished from southern Alabama and Mississippi. The beautiful creatures, jet black with a hint of blue, are fairly docile and completely harmless to humans.īut the last time an indigo was seen in Alabama was in 1954. The eastern indigo snake Drymarchon couperi, the longest native North American snake, once slithered along the forest floors there and helped control the rest of the snake community with its eating habits – dining not just on copperheads, but also on the venomous cottonmouths, rattlesnakes and others.

Copperhead snakes are the most commonly encountered type of snake in the southern parts of the US state of Alabama.

Texas indigo snake fealmale