I don’t want to bother Rudy Mancke again…

So I thought I’d see if any of y’all know what these things are…

One of them’s a snake, and in the past I’ve asked Rudy about snakes — here and here — but I hate to bug him about a tiny snake.

This little guy — he’s barely a foot long — was poised at the entrance of my garage when I came back from a walk yesterday. (See how he’s mostly lying in a crack? The nearer darker concrete is my driveway, the concrete he’s moving onto is the garage floor.)

I shot this picture, and then went inside, and texted the picture to my wife, who promptly asked me to keep him (or her, if you can tell) out of the garage. She didn’t want to get a surprise upon opening one of the many containers of junk out there.

So I went back out, and immediately saw one of our resident cats standing over the spot where the snake had been. When I walked toward her, she slipped away — she’s not the world’s most sociable cat. Near as I could tell, she didn’t have anything wriggly hanging out of her mouth as she did so.

A closeup…

And the snake was gone. I figure the cat scared it off. I hope so.

The other picture is the oddest assortment of little anthills (or something) I’ve ever seen. These were covering a large portion of a neighbor’s yard where erosion had eliminated greenery.

I’m used to seeing huge, multi-family anthills around here. This looked like ant suburbs, with little hills made of ticky-tacky crowded together.

What kind of ant — or some other creature — does this kind of thing? If you know, let me know…