Among North America's rarest snakes, the Louisiana Pine Snake's small population size is the result of its highly specific habitat requirements and the resulting sensitivity to human-driven habitat changes that comes with them; members of this species feed primarily on Baird's Pocket Gophers (a specific species of burrowing rodent,) and almost always live in abandoned Baird's Pocket Gopher burrows (often after having eaten the burrows creator,) and as such in areas where Baird's Pocket Gophers are not present Lousiana Pine Snakes cannot survive. Native to western Lousiana and eastern Texas, members of this species do best in pine forests (particularly those dominated by a specific species of pine, Pinus palustris, forests of which are noted to generally support high levels of biodiversity as a result of the loose canopies they form which allow many smaller species of plants to coexist with them,) and spend most of their lives underground, rarely travelling far from their stolen burrows. They emerge from their burrows mainly during the mid-day to hunt (targeting rabbits, frogs and other rodents when Baird's Pocket Gophers are scarce,) but otherwise remain concealed underground in order to avoid predation and unusually high or low temperatures; during the winter, when the weather becomes colder and prey becomes scarcer, they travel deeper into a Baird's Pocket Gopher burrow and hibernate until the early spring.
