Glad it entertained you, I don't understand why people were under the impression I was collecting this species and feeding it to my snakes cause it was fun and I liked killing off some rare snake. the shorthead garter snake will always be the most common snake in my area. Since I was 7 years old looking for snakes the shortheads were a guaranteed find.

I don't know if any of you ever kept shortheads but to respond to the original post before the thread became about me I kept a couple of them here and there through my childhood, they'll only eat worms, they won't switch to fish or mice. In some snakes the dorsal stripe is faded out, usually the snakes are brown with a yellow stripe, I've seen some with yellow stripes, the hypomelanistic specimen I found years ago was a good bit yellowish. It gave birth to 7 normal babies but was pretty skinny after that and didn't really recover. I didn't even know it was gravid.
The babies are about 4 inches long, sometimes 5, they're usually born in August-September. By the time spring rolls around babies born the previous year are usually about 7-8 inches. Unlike the eastern garter snake the shorthead doesn't bite, I've grabbed gravid females or snakes that ate recently and they'll open their mouth at you but won't strike. Probably like 7 years ago I found a shorthead that I assume was Erythristic, it was a red/orange color with a yellow stripe, wasn't even lucky enough to catch that one.
Last year I was considering taking natural pics of some shortheads and their pattern variations since I doubt there's too many pictures of them out there? Ended up deciding not to because of the protected status. Are they all but gone from New York?? Does anybody actually know? I would think that shortheads would just adapt to city life, because that's pretty much how they are in my area, you're gonna find shortheads in large numbers in people's backyards, never really in the woods though. There's one street in particular that's probably a mile long, with grass on side of the road, and a sewage stream on the other side. Boards along either side of that road were a goldmine for finding snakes when I was a little kid. And debris along this set of out of service rail road tracks.
I'm wondering if fish and game still does the population survey? I know I filled out a packet of info back in 2006 maybe, showing how many shorthead garter snakes were actually in my area.