Gopher Snakes

 

 When I was little and growing up in Berkeley, I kept lots of snakes for pets, but they were all little snakes, ring-necked snakes and garter snakes and, I learned, if I turned over the strips of bark on the ground that peeled off the eucalyptus trees, I could find Sharp-tailed Snakes, which gave me special pleasure because I had it in my head that these were very rare. But the first large snakes I caught and kept as a kid were gopher snakes, and I have been fond of them ever since.

Across the street from our house there was a large vacant lot (large enough that eventually four houses were built on it, which will tell you how long ago this was, in a Berkeley long-since devoid of vacant lots). When I was a kid, that lot was my bit of nature for finding my various pets to make cages for, and one day I was hunting for interesting insects to keep in jars when I looked down  a hole in the ground and saw a gopher (I am talking about the rodent, now, not the snake) looking back up at me. I got a quick look at its orange incisors, then it disappeared, and a whim took me that I could dig out its burrow and catch it when I got to the bottom.

The burrow ran along just inches below the soil, and the dirt was so soft I could dig it out just by pulling it up with my hands. By the time I had  spent all day at it, I had a good sense of the turns and twists, the sidings, the changes in depth, the areas that were lived in, the others that were just roads, and suddenly there were two enormous gopher snakes in it each one longer than I was tall. 

One broke and "ran" for it, whishing through the grass, the other sat still, and I picked it up and cradled it in my arm. It never attempted to bite or struggle as I carried it home and began building a cage for it.

The next connection with gopher snakes was twenty-odd years later when I moved to Iowa City to earn my PhD. One day my wife and I were driving down a busy highway when we saw a large gopher snake in the middle of it. Huge semis were roaring by and it seemed like its good luck would leave it very quickly. I pulled over, waited for a break, raced out and snatched it off the road. I don't remember if it bit me, but it was hissing loudly and showing little in the way of gratitude. We were driving an old VW bug which had the engine in the rear, so I opened the front compartment, which was empty except for the spare tire, dropped the snake in and slammed it shut before the snake could slip back out.

When we got back to our apartment, Cheryl held its tail while I unwound it from round and round the spare tire. It was still hissing; I don't think it ever stopped. We put it in an aquarium I had with me which had a very weak wire screen top. And every evening before we went to bed we came into the room where it was kept, searched around until we found where it was hiding after having escaped from the aquarium, then Cheryl held its tail while I unwound it from the shelf of books it had wound around, as it hissed furiously at us.

We didn't mind turning this one loose when we left Iowa City.

 Go forward thirty years while I have my career, and retire.

Go forward twenty more years of gentlemanly retirement, and we move to Tucson.

There to discover that gopher snakes are one of the commonest snakes.

Except that they are a different subspecies, the Sonoran Gopher Snake. I was rather shocked by seeing this one, which seemed half yellow and, fully stretched out, long and thin enough to be two snakes.

But let me hasten to say, this snake, in some magical way, pulled itself together and before my eyes became the big muscular constrictor that you see in the picture at the top of this blog. That picture was taken two minutes after this one, and my life-long image was preserved.

 

Around this time...

 It happens faithfully once a year: Mule Deer (AKA Black-tailed Deer) suddenly invade our yard. They are always males, their antlers either in velvet or thoroughly out, and with enormous racks, or with velvet that soon will be enormous. Sometimes there are a dozen, sometimes only one. They drink from our water dishes that we put out for animals, then go to a remote corner of our yard where they stay for a few days, while their characteristic droppings pile up. This must be the time because lately Cheryl and I had begun thinking about them. Today when I woke from my afternoon nap she pointed out our back window and just outside our javelina fence was a male in velvet, looking, as they always do, the size of a moose.

Why only males? Where do they come from? Where do they go?

 

At around the same time (and there is no mystery this time, just the unrolling of early spring) the quail begin appearing with a daily-diminishing number of tiny chicks (this year we actually saw a Cooper's Hawk grab one, though you think it would hardly be worth his while).

 

I mentioned in my last blog the magical appearance from underground of our two Gila Monsters, and usually their rather quick disappearance back again.

A little bit less welcome is the arrival of the Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes. Cheryl is the rattlesnake wrangler in the family. When we first moved in here and had our first rattlesnake, we photographed it, and enjoyed watching the round-tailed ground squirrels testing their courage by darting at it from as close as they dared, then jumping back at the last second. But as we noticed that the snake was still hanging around the next day and the next we decided it was overstaying its welcome and took advantage of a service the fire department offers to remove it for us. When we called, a fireman came up and netted  it very competently. His rules said he needed to release it somewhere within a mile of where he caught it. He gave us a talking to about the brush piles we had left around, which would attract more snakes. The next time we had a rattlesnake, Cheryl worked out her own way to deal with it. She turned the hose nozzle to its stiffest stream and pointed it directly at the rattlesnake's head, and it turned out that the snake couldn't stand it and immediately began racing away, so that she easily drove it into the ditch beyond our land.

Of course you need to see the snake in the first place before you can remove it, and they are wonderful at concealing themselves. The worry is always you will inadvertently put your hand or foot too close to it. Well, we are getting pretty good at finding them first, and the trick is to watch the behavior of other animals, since nobody likes rattlesnakes.

At any given time there are a dozen Round-tailed Ground Squirrels in view in our backyard. Generally they are a nuisance eating all of our plants, but they provide a service in this way: If they see a rattlesnake, they face it agitatedly and begin stamping their feet at it. This is readily visible from a  distance, and is designed to be a warning signal to everything around.

 

 Here is a squirrel showing a rattlesnake off the premises.

Quail are the other indicator species. We first  grew aware of this one day when we saw a group  of five or six quail walking along in such a tight group that they were almost touching each other. That was so curious that we put our binoculars on them and saw they were closely following a Gila Monster. Just the other day we saw two quail walking in that nearly-touching way back and forth over a small piece of ground. This was just outside our side-gate in a place where we often put our hands to arrange the hose. I examined it as carefully as I could and finally made out a circle of slightly raised soil which in fact was a coiled rattlesnake buried just under the surface.