Im sorry about the horrible photos. This guys a super fast mover plus my eight year old assisted me...not the best but it will have to do. Anyhow, these little guys have been showing up in my 12'-6'-4' pond, and this is the second one so far. Water snakes are live born correct? Wonder where mamma is. I fear for my koi.
Catfish :o

Another one:
Again sorry about the quality, I wish i had a working camera with zoom as well.


They dont seem to bite, only gape thier mouths at me when I pick them up or look at them, kind of like a cottonmouth. We dont have cottonmouths in southern NJ though.
Does anyone know, if this is indeed a NWS, do they mimin cottonmouths? Ive heard northern water snakes have very painful bites and thier saliva has an anti coagulant. (I'm sure I splled that wrong!!)
Catfish

Last one I promise :P This is the belly. the coloring is odd.
It should be fun getting these guys out. I have another smaller 4'-3'-2' molded pond too, and my daughter just informed me one was swimming in it.
UGH! I find it unbelievable that a water snake would have young in/near a suburban backyard pond. Ive never seen one close to hear, and the closest perm water is a lake about a half mile away. We do have a drainage ditch that has water after rain. NJ does tend to be damp!!
Catfish

There are some dozen species of water snake. It does seem to be a water snake. It's pretty small (young). Here's the enature page on the Northern water snake:

http://www.enature.com/fieldguides/detail....e=&curPageNum=2

I'm afraid I'm not very good at telling similar species of water snake apart. Enature lists 11 species of water snake.

This pdf page lists the snakes of New Jersey. The Northern water snake is the only water snake that they list. I don't know if it's a complete list. They have photos at the bottom of the file.

http://www.state.nj.us/dep/fgw/ensp/pdf/snakes.pdf

Here's the Google images gallery of photos of the Northern water snake which do look similar to your photos:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=No...ter+snake&gbv=2

I hope things work out with all those snakes!

Thanks Robyn!!!
After searching the googles you found, I finally found a pic of a newborn that is so dark in color. Every website states that the neonates are very brightly colored and it threw me off, because you can barely see his markings w/o a flash or bright light. They seem very mild too, not the aggressive beasties explained. Perhaps that comes with age. ;) They just gape mouths when I pick them up, but have yet to strike at me.
They are about 6" stretched out, and about a quarter of inch wide.

My daughters want to keep the one we have captive, but I keep telling them he will grow up nasty. Maybe I will let them have a nice, captive bred kingsnake later :P
Catfish