‘Every six to eight weeks in the warm months, the garter snake prepares for the ceremony of renewal peculiar to its own kind: It sheds its skin. The process is a curious one. The snake seeks a dark, sheltered, confined spot—inside a stone wall, say, or in a brush pile or a stack of cordwood. There it rubs its head and jaws against some rough surface until the outermost layer of epidermis, which over the past few days will have become soft and dull in color, has torn. The snake then hooks or catches the loosened covering on some projection and slowly crawls out of its own skin, turning the skin inside out behind it as it goes, much as a woman removes a nylon stocking.

The cast-off skin is a remarkable thing, a kind of airy, gossamer replica of the snake itself. Every tiny scale and plate, even the empty lenses that covered the eyes, is present. Weirdly, the snake seems to have departed, leaving behind its hologram, the ghost of a garter snake…’

The Old Farmer’s Almanac
2007