This beautiful snake is a male WESTERN HOGNOSE SNAKE, a species which in the wild would be found from southern Canada throughout central USA to eastern Mexico. 

Hognose snakes are generally very docile but if they feel threatened by a predator in the wild they can hiss loudly and flatten their neck like a cobra!  The hissing sounds a lot like a puffing noise, and this is why I decided to name this little guy Puff!  If this bluffing display does not scare the predator away a hognose snake will pretend to be dead by lying on its back and letting its mouth hang open and tongue hang out of the mouth.  In doing so they display their belly colours which are a lot different than those on the top of the body as you can see below!

As with many animals the combination of black and yellow is being used as a warning of danger to deter predators, this combined with the 'playing dead' trick is a very impressive display indeed!

Hognose snakes get their common name due to their funny-looking upturned snout, which is used to dig through the soil in search for frogs and toads, which form the majority of their diet in the wild.  You can see Puff's upturned snout really clearly in the next picture, and his jet black tongue in the one which follows:

These pictures were taken when I acquired Puff in September 2009, he weighed just 11 grammes! 

If you think Puff looks small just take a look at the tiny newly-hatched babies below, four of them on the palm of my friend Sarah's hand!

Hognose snakes are regularly bred in captivity and my friends Sarah & Jim had a successful breeding year in 2010.  Interestingly the eggs from which the snakes above hatched were not very highly calcified but this didn't in any way affect the babies' development! 

Most reptile eggs are very different from bird eggs in that the shells are flexible and leathery in texture rather than hard.  Reptile eggs are still calcified so that they usually appear white or cream in colour, and they are certainly not usually transparent, but it just so happened that this clutch of eggs were not as calcified as usual.  This meant that Sarah & Jim could actually see the development of the babies inside the eggs from the outside, as shown in this image of the eggs whilst they were being incubated!

Here is one of them hatching, always a fantastic sight even when they are not your own babies! 

Many thanks to Sarah & Jim for their kind permission to use these images on my website!