Sometimes it's very difficult to determine what species you've got just by colour pattern alone. Within a species, subspecies and even from individual to individual you can have quite a bit of variation. Scale counts though, I believe, are a much better way of determining species, since this should be relatively constant through out the species. Personally, I don't like to limit it to any one characteristic, but instead take everything into account when trying to make a determination. This also includes, geographical info. on the snakes (ie. where they came from), size, body shape, ect., anything that can help me to determine what it is. You really just can't take one thing and say, "Well it has this, so it must be this."...that's just bad science. Bad...vey bad!
