Red touches black. Alternating black, red, and light-colored bands or blotches. Light-colored bands vary by individual from gray, to cream, to light orange. Head variable but almost never all black. Snout rounded. Belly with checkerboard pattern. 
Species: L. gentilis (Western Milksnake) and L. triangulum (Eastern Milksnake)
Arkansas Herpetological Atlas 2019
This species is represented by 239 records from 30 sources: 159 museum (
), 1 literature (
), 0 research (
), and 64 observation (
), with 15 additional Trauth et al. (2004) locality points remaining unsourced (
). It has been museum vouchered for 51 of 75 counties (), with 7 additional counties having other forms of reported occurrence (). Years of collection range from 1853 to present.
As currently ascribed, L. triangulum (■) occurs throughout much of the Ozark Highlands and Crowley’s Ridge, with isolated record clusters in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain from the vicinity of Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge and the confluence of the Arkansas and White rivers. Lampropeltis gentilis (■) occurs throughout the Ouachita Mountains and much of the South Central Plains. A relatively broad zone of contact north of the Arkansas River is hypothesized to extend from the northwest corner southeastward to central Arkansas, on the basis of gestalt appearance of photographed specimens submitted to iNaturalist. Reconstruction of this formerly wide-ranging monophyletic species into 7 disparate species (Ruane et al., 2014), not well-aligned to previous subspecies designations nor palaeogeographies, has not been universally accepted (Chambers and Hillis, 2019).
