Gopher Snake, Pituophis melanoleucus; photo by Bob McClellan in northern California

A good first step in learning about your own local snakes is to find or make a list of snake species in your area. Sometimes local naturalists prepar such lists, which may be found by searching on the Internet, using keywords such as "snake list Nashville Tennessee."

Wikipedia has a page called Lists of snakes of the United States, on which, as of 2021, snake lists are provided for about half of the US states. In Europe, on the "List of Reptiles of Europe" page there's a snake list.

If you have a field guide for snakes, go through the distribution maps of every species in the book, listing all the species which possibly could occur in your area. Once you have that list, then you can begin learning about each species, and looking for them in the right places.

To give you an idea of what such a list could look like, below is such a list based on a field guide's distribution maps, made for the Natchez area of southwestern Mississippi.

The species marked with a ? are those for which Natchez lies at the very edge of the species' distribution, so it was unclear from the maps whether the species were present or not. The names in red are venomous species.