Colubrids (Colubridae) are snakes with generally long and slender bodies, which are always longer than the tail. For snakes of this family it is characteristic that they have only one row of scales between the eye and the mouth. The pupil in our colubrids is round, with the exception of the cat-eyed snake, which has a vertically elliptical pupil, but lives only in the coastal belt of Primorska.
Colubrids are a large family of snakes, comprising almost two-thirds of all known snake species. The members of this family do not live in Antarctica and in the northern parts of North America, Europe and Asia; they are not found in most of Australia, in New Zealand, Greenland and the high mountains in western South America and in the Sahara. In Slovenia there are nine species of colubrids, three of them also around Lake Cerknica and its surroundings.
