Identification help please

[npgoodness]

I found this snake on a rock wall outside my house in Maine but I'm not sure what species it is. I first thought it was a northern ringneck but it has no ring. Could this be a mutation, or is it a different snake altogether? Sorry about the sideways pictures. I imported from my phone.

[SnoopySnake]

Can you upload the pics to photobucket or something similar? It's hard to tell because the pics are a bit small.

[npgoodness]

Here, I cropped the images:

[eminart]

I don't know Maine well, but my gut tells me that is a species of garter snake, with limited striping.

[npgoodness]

I checked on the MaineHerp website and it didn't match any of the species there.

[eminart]

I'm fairly certain it's a garter with very indistinct stripes. The head is right, keeled scales, and there does appear to be faint side stripes.

[FWK]

Odd looking critter eh? I agree with eminart though, it's a Garter. Garters are surprisingly variable. I'm going to stop at the species level (Common Garter/Thamnophis sirtalis) because I'm finding conflicting information on the ranges and morphology of both subspecies that are said to be found in Maine, Eastern Garter Snake (T. s. sirtalis) and Maritime Garter Snake (T. s. pallidulus). Thanks for posting the little guy. I'll keep poking around to see if I can find a good paper on Garters.

[Jrich]

There's a good snake identification group on Facebook. There are hundreds of snakes identified every week if you wanna post the picture up there. Just type in Snake Identification on Facebook. It's a public group. Usually the snake can identified within in the first 30 minutes.

[RAD House]

I would venture to guess maritime garter as they are supposedly more common in Maine, but is definitely a subspecies of common garter T. sirtalis. Cool snake. I don't know if I have ever seen one quite so patternless.

[npgoodness]

There's a good snake identification group on Facebook. There are hundreds of snakes identified every week if you wanna post the picture up there. Just type in Snake Identification on Facebook. It's a public group. Usually the snake can identified within in the first 30 minutes.

I'll check the group out and let you guys know what they think. Thanks for the input everyone!

[npgoodness]

People are saying that it's a stripeless variant of Thamnophis sirtalis (common gartersnake). Not as exotic as I was hoping to find, but still pretty cool.

[RAD House]

It may be a common species but the patterning on it is very unique.