Venomous Creatures

 We have recently discovered a new park which is (we can scarcely believe our good luck) an eight-minute drive from our house. It's an oasis in the midst of the desert, called Agua Caliente ("Warm Springs"). It features a chain of large and small lakes joined by walking trails, and a background of giant palm trees. Everything about it is beautiful, and ideally set up for our daily walk, and we go almost daily. Right now the days are torrid, so we get up early (5:30) and go there before breakfast when it is still cool. It never seems to be annoyingly crowded, but it certainly has a lot of people (very friendly people) out walking just as we are, though mostly they are also walking their dogs (usually very friendly dogs).

As much of the park as possible is kept untouched to attract nature. Birds and dragonflies make up a great part of the wildlife,  and we especially enjoy the soft-shelled turtles pulled up on the banks of the smaller lakes. They look sort of like pancakes with snake heads.

But the first thing you notice when you enter the park is that they have put up signs everywhere seeking to warn us that there is a serpent in this paradise, a rattlesnake.   We keep looking for them, but have never seen one here. Anyone who reads this blog very often knows we don't dread the rattlesnakes that we have at our own home, and some of you might think we are already overly fond of them.

And this brings me to what I want to write about. I guess many or most people don't like snakes at all. But if, like me, you have always liked snakes, and kept them for pets, and so on, then ordinary snakes are fine, but venomous snakes stand out and are always the ones you are most interested in. They somehow seem superior. Maybe it  is because they are potentially dangerous, maybe because you have to keep your eye on them. It is a sort of respect. If you decide to keep a venomous snake (and I confess I never did) then it means you have moved up into the big leagues. I was thinking about that recently when I was looking at some photographs of snakes I took when we lived in Arkansas. They are almost entirely of venomous species. There was simply more variety in Arkansas , and you were more likely to encounter them every time you went out in the wilds. Probably it's because there is so much more water in Arkansas than there is here, paths through parks and game department territory usually following streams, and snakes are to be found associated with water, and the snakes you see most often are cottonmouths.

Sometimes in the shadows of a swamp a white mouth will fall open, and that is the cottonmouth's warning not to come closer, as surely as a rattlesnake's rattle.

Here is a story about cottonmouths that may be true or may be a myth: When they are small, recently born, they have the tip of the tail yellow. What we are told is that they dangle this yellow tip and jiggle it. A lizard sees that and thinks it is some small creature it can eat, and pounces on it, thus bringing itself close enough for the cottonmouth to strike it and catch it for its own meal. Here is a young snake still with a bit of yellow on the tail tip.

 I have the clearest recollection that I actually saw one wriggling its tail trying to attract a lizard, but now, since I didn't photograph it, I  can no longer be sure I saw it, and thus I have lost the fame that might have come with proving the myth. Alas, and my memory isn't getting any better.

Another very common venomous snake, often virtually invisible in a pile of rotten wood from a fallen tree, is the copperhead.

But this species isn't treated with as much respect as the others. A country doctor (in a place where people do get bitten from time to time) once told me he didn't treat copperhead bites at all, except to give the victim something to calm him down. Hmm. I think I might go to someone else.

Driving on dirt roads in game department land, we sometimes would see a timber snake sunning on the road. We didn't trust the next  person coming by to go out of his way to avoid squashing it, so we always stopped and got a long stick and tried to chase it off the road. Something we learned in this way is that these large snakes have a very mild temper. No matter how we wrestled them around they never rattled or showed any emotion except for surprise that we were treating them so rudely.

And finally there's this little snake, the western pigmy rattlesnake. I don't know much about it, except that it is tiny.

There is this feeling that here in the desert southwest is where the variety is to be found. But here in Tucson we only ever see Western Diamondbacks, at least that's the case here in our backyard. On the other hand, Western Diamondbacks are my favorite snakes, and frankly I think it could eat all the others for breakfast.