Our Porch at Night (part two)

In the previous blog (Our Porch at Night [part one]) I was talking about our bats, and how we entertained dinner guests and ourselves sitting in the window that gave onto our porch with the outside light on, watching the bats streaking by emptying our hummingbird feeders.  It looked like a close-in bombing raid, in a sinister way rather like the attack on Pearl Harbor, especially with the distant thunder rumbling. I had always wanted to get a good photo of these bats in flight, though it seemed impossible, but I made some progress this time, and I will make another try tonight.

But what I'm writing about here is that once we came outside in the dark to try to photo the bats, we were quite astonished at the variety of life we found on the porch. We took our big flashlight and flashed it against the back of the porch, in other words, the outer wall of our house, and the first thing we saw was a red-spotted toad, unexpected so far from any water. And right next to it, not unexpected, but certainly

 making us take notice, was a Bark Scorpion, the most venomous  of the scorpions. It's true I  kept one briefly as a pet, but that was contained within an aquarium, not wandering free to climb into our shoes before we put them on in the morning.

Next was a Mediterranean Gecko, not a surprise, as they must be in everybody's home in Tucson, but usually this introduced species is found inside the house. These exotic creatures are always welcome.

Most fun was to find the porch was teeming with Pocket Mice. These tiny creatures resemble miniature Kangaroo Rats. In fact I believe they also, at least occasionally. walk upright on their hind legs.

And finally, and most dramatic, an enormous jet-black tarantula.

During the day the porch is generally inhabited by more "normal" creatures, round-tailed ground squirrels, three or four species of lizards, two or three dozen species of birds, an unending line of harvester ants, an occasional rattlesnake, most of these attracted by the meal worms we throw out, and the hummingbird feeders we refill after the bats have emptied them.

And at the very moment I wrote these words about the daytime inhabitants of the porch, a brand new species appeared there for the first time. We saw what we thought was a large swallowtail butterfly out the window, and, looking to identify which swallowtail it was, we could see it was dark with almost no visible markings. We grabbed our cameras and rushed outside and saw it wasn't a butterfly at all, it was an enormous moth: a Black Witch. In our experience, these big day-flying moths appear out of nowhere, can be seen in the yard for a few days usually flying at tree-height, than go on their way, enwrapped in the mystery their name suggests.

Our Porch at Night (part one)

 At this time of year Mexican Long-tongued Bats come up from Mexico into southern Arizona where they feed on nectar from flowers and on sugar water from hummingbird feeders. Bird lovers often get annoyed to find all their hummingbird feeders drained dry every night, but if you have an outside light on so that you can see them it is worth it just to to see the waves of bats sweeping through your yard. I decided I would attempt to get some pictures of them. It turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be. You see, they move very fast, and they don't have wings shaped to make an air foil which would give them lift, so they are unable to hover in front of a flower or hummingbird feeder; they have to keep traveling forward or they will simply fall out of the sky. So when they get in front of a hummingbird feeder, they can only pause for a second to get a quick slurp. That means, first of all, you only get that one second to click the shutter. And next, it is  dark night, very difficult visibility to aim the camera and focus it, in that one second.

We have a porch along the side of our house overlooking the backyard, and that porch has a number of hummingbird feeders on it, so that is the area the bats are attracted to. I thought the solution would be to use our light- and movement-sensitive game camera, which would be automatically tripped by the bats. We tied the camera to a post pointed to a feeder, and went to bed assured that by the next morning we would have dozens of images.

Well, the bats were so fast they came and went before the camera had a chance to see them and so no  pictures were taken.

All right: I decided I would have to sit out there, and trip the camera myself. But it turned out the porch light produced so little light I couldn't see to aim or focus the camera any better than the automatic camera could. So I thought I would make one more try before giving up. First of all, the next morning,  I put the camera on a tripod so I could point the camera at a feeder and focus it by daylight, and then I left it out there pre-aimed and pre-focused. That night (which was last night) once the bats started circling the porch at high speed I sat next to the camera and every time a bat made its one-second pause in front of the feeder I clicked the shutter, and I could see when the flash revealed the bat's brown color and I would know I had timed it right.

The first picture shows a bat from behind, the underside of its head reaching down to drink some sugar-water. The second picture shows a bat from the side.

So this showed the bats, which was our intention, but in the act of going out on the porch in the darkness, something evidently we had not done before, we learned that the porch at night is teeming with totally unexpected life. In part two part of this blog I will show the life we discovered.

Pack Rat (part two)

 

 

 

Here is a typical pack rat nest such as I described in my last blog, the mess of fallen and rotting cacti that in some cases can preserve its original material from nearly forty-thousand years ago. Because of the cooler and hotter periods such an ancient nest went through in all that time, scientists think it will give us useful clues for how the vegetation will change during the warmer periods we expect in the future.

 

 

 The pack rat compulsively cares for the nest, constantly trimming off pieces of cholla and leaving them lying around, a sure sign that the nest is active. 

Well, I started getting these little calling cards in the garage. Instead of fresh green bits of cholla, these were old dry ones, the best he could find in the garage, but I knew exactly what it meant. It meant a pack rat was living out of sight in the garage. And my car was only a few steps away. I opened the hood and here's what I found in the engine compartment. I've seen too many pictures of cars left parked and undriven for a couple of months with engines that were totally covered with bits of cacti, engines that had virtually become nests.

 That's when I brought out the HAVAHART trap, spent about an hour trying to figure how it worked,  and after a few trials and errors, caught the angelic looking creature you saw in the first picture in this blog on pack rats. It would need to be taken at least a mile away or it would return. We drove for at least a mile, and began looking for a spot to release it. 

It's not as easy as it sounds; a mile from our house is another house, and a mile from that house is still another house. As good neighbors, we wouldn't want to leave it by somebody else's garage, especially knowing if we got caught they would come after us with a posse. We finally parked by a place that was at least a few feet more than a mile beyond the closest house, and I tried to look like I was examining a tire while car after car drove suspiciously by. Finally there was a gap, I pitched the rat out and we raced for home.

We're still waiting for it to return. 

Pack Rat

 Over the past couple of years, with these posts, I have been introducing you to the animals that share their land with us here. Naturally I started with the largest, the most dramatic, the most beautiful, the bobcats, the coyotes, the Javelinas, the black-tailed deer, the Cooper's hawks, the Harris's hawks, the western diamond-backed rattlesnakes, the gila monsters, the Mexican long-tongued bats, the desert blond tarantulas, the solifuge, the Costa's hummingbirds, the Anna's hummingbirds, the broad-billed hummingbirds. After a list like that it might seem like I am now down to  the dregs, but in fact maybe I am down to the most extraordinary of them all. I am talking about the pack rat (Neotoma albigula).

 He's really quite handsome, nice rounded ears, shiny black eye, furry tail, no narrow ratty face. And if you see him move, he has a wonderful agility and can go anywhere, climb anything. But notice that this photo is taken while he is imprisoned, which he richly deserves. You see, he can't resist setting up his lodging in your garage, and once he is in your garage he can't resist moving into the engine  compartment of your car. What he does then is get into the spaghetti of crucial wires behind the dashboard and cut and trim and rearrange them to make a comfortable nest, in the act costing you several thousand dollars to get them back the way they are supposed to be. Just say the word pack rat to anyone in Tucson and you immediately get stories of the horrors they have caused, and the revenges that are planned.

When we were moving in, and the previous owner was moving out, he gave me some tips about the pack rats. First of all he told me he was leaving me a HAVAHART trap, which he had used to catch the pack rats. Originally he would take them a mile away and release them. But almost immediately, its place in the garage would be taken by a new one. So finally he wised up and brushed some blue paint onto the back of the next one, and sure enough they were all returning to the garage almost before he could get back himself. It turns out pack rats have a fanatic loyalty to their home, and a sure sense of geography, so he learned to take them much farther away.

Garages usually have enough junk piled in them to give the pack rat lots of room to hide under, but out in the desert where they make their natural homes you see an area four or five feet wide made up of dozens of pads of cacti gathered together with tunnels running under them. The owner of the nest keeps it up, refurbishing it when it needs more bits of cacti (usually cholla) , and if something happens to the owner, another pack rat comes in and takes over. And it is here that you learn what an amazing creature this is. Scientists have carefully examined the disintegrating material at the lowest level of the nest and have found, in some cases, traces of pollen of plants that no longer grow where the nest is, plants that grew there when the climate was very different, material that can be traced back as much as forty-thousand years, which is how long that particular nest has been continuously occupied!

(End of part one of "Pack Rats")

 

Harris's Hawk

When we first moved here (a couple of years ago, now), Cooper's Hawks were very common. Scarcely a day would go by that we didn't see one. We frequently saw them catch their prey, mantle it for  few moments, then carry it to a broad horizontal branch in the middle of the back yard and pluck most of its feathers before eating it. They caught mainly Gambel's Quail, less often White-winged Doves (perhaps because those were faster flyers), and an occasional Cooper's would specialize in the Round-tailed
Ground Squirrels, which are very common here. The hawks paid almost no attention to us, so we got to watch them from close up for a good insight into their lives.

Sometimes we would see a dark hawk sitting near the top of a tree. This was the Harris's Hawk. It's quite a handsome bird, black and chocolate brown, with a black band on the tip of the tail, and white all the way around the base of the tail. There's a house across the street from us, and from our angle we could see into its backyard which had some big mesquite trees in it, and a pair of Harris's that may have been nesting in them. The birds never seemed to do anything, so we decided that it was a pretty mild bird compared to the Cooper's. Here's where we were wrong. We had a pair of half-tame Roadrunners  in a tree in our front yard with a nest-full of babies almost ready to fledge. The Harris's had a clear but distant view of the Roadrunners constantly flying in to feed them, and one day ripped through the nest and stole them all.

We suddenly had a good deal more respect for them as predators

 

Recently a Harris's visited us, landing in some trees in our backyard close to our house, and we had our closest view ever. Cheryl got this really nice picture. Look at those long legs and oversized talons, look at that meat-cleaver beak. This bird is built on the plan of a small eagle.

This is when I began patching together a theory. For months now we had scarcely seen a Cooper's Hawk. The horizontal branch on the "plucking" tree no longer seemed to be in use. When a panic suddenly cleared birds out of the bird feeders, if we looked at the top of a tall pine tree on the edge of our lot it was always the Harris's sitting there. I wondered if the Harris's had chased the Cooper's out of our yard. In a  fight, if these fierce birds ever fight with each other, I don't think the Cooper's would stand a chance.

The Harris's doesn't live as openly in front of us as the Cooper's, so we don't know as much about them. For instance with the exception of them robbing the Roadrunner's nest, we have never seen them with prey so we don't know what it is most likely to be. In one source, we read that they prey on small mammals, but have never witnessed that ourselves. We know that Cooper's favor quail, a sumptuous meal worth chasing down, but we have also seen a Cooper's catch a half-grown quail out of the line following its parents.

There is another development. Lately we have seen two Harris's together in our backyard. Are they thinking of nesting here now?

This is probably stretching my theory that the Harris's has driven the Cooper's  out of our yard, but if Harris's indeed prefer mammals, and Cooper's quail, it could be the Harrris's are in a sense preserving quail in our yard, and this year we have noticed that we seem to have more quail than ever, with the young that follow behind them preserving their numbers exceptionally well.

We will watch how this develops.

Some more on tarantulas

 

First of all, with my ignorance, I gave you some bad information. I said I thought this was a female. In fact, this is a male, which is shown by the black color of the inner sides of the legs. So this one is the one who, when it is mature, will go off looking for a female, which it will mate with, then die. So I would rather have had a long-lived female. But the good side is that this male is only half-grown. We recently found a wandering male run-over dead on the road, and it was twice the size of my pet.

This species, which looks so formidable, doesn't bite. You can put it on your arm and it will just walk harmlessly along it (admittedly it feels a bit weird). On the other hand, if you attack it roughly it will rapidly use its hind legs to scrape hair off its abdomen. The fine hairs (called urticating hairs) will break up into a cloud of floating bits of hair that are very irritating if they get into your eyes or nose.

When we first moved to Tucson a couple of years ago, I began photographing every spider we found in the house, and I would try to identify them later. One day I found three or four small spiders in the bathroom, all with the same marking, an abdomen split in two, black on the back half, pale on the front half. I photographed them but never found out what they were. One day I was reading something about tarantulas, and there they were, baby tarantulas, and I was sorry I had not taken clearer pictures of them, and especially sorry I did not try to raise one of them.

The mother tarantula lays its eggs inside her burrow, and keeps them there for a while. Then when she thinks the time is ripe, she opens the burrow, and the young stride out one by one and march off across the desert, evidently a wonderful scene if you have the luck to witness it. I have no idea how these got into our house and ended up in our bathroom. If I had photographed them more carefully you would see the black half of the abdomen was made up of the already fully formed urticating hairs they would use for defense

A Fuzzy New Pet

 We've been warned repeatably that our three-year-long drought is going to continue bone-dry right on through our totally failing monsoon season, and our temperature would be up in the three-digits every day. Well, it's 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon and it is 73 degrees, and this is the first time in the past three days that it has finally stopped raining. We can't go to our beautiful park for our pre-breakfast walk because water is crossing the roads and there's no way to get through. If this was the turn the weather was going to take you think we would be thrilled and relieved. The truth is we are getting fed up with the soggy gloom.

I would probably be sitting in the house getting bored if it wasn't that I had a new pet.

Now I know it seems like I only write about poisonous snakes and scorpions and never write about fuzzy and furry creatures. But I'm not always like that. We found this new, very fuzzy and furry creature, or rather, our cat found it for us, walking down the hall, and we grabbed it for our own.

This is the Desert Blond Tarantula, a symbol of the Arizona desert. Full grown, the species has a four-inch leg span. When you see them wandering the roads at night it is generally an adult male searching for a female, and mating will be his last act. He literally gives it his all. I have occasionally brought one home but they don't eat and they just die. The females live for a much longer time, but they are harder to find. You don't find them wandering. They stay home in their burrow and wait for the male to come by.

Well, I really don't know how you sex them, but I believe this a female, and better still, I think it is only half grown, So I might be able to keep this one as long as I want. (I have looked it up, and the oldest one on record lived 49 years. Maybe I better think through this; I might have to remember this one in my will.

I have kept a solefugid (another exotic arachnid) for a pet, and they are fairly easy, because they will eat meal worms. The one I had lived for about a year, which may be their life span. I have kept a few scorpions for pets, but often had trouble getting them to eat, and I have had to let them go. That's what I did with my bark scorpion. and I still miss it. Anyway, getting this one to eat was the first concern.

Heather, my daughter-in-law, went to the pet store and got me a packet of baby crickets. We poured them all into the aquarium. Now, there is another slight problem with tarantulas, and that is, they come out at night in the darkness, which can make them problematic to observe. I had about two inches of gravel in the bottom of the tank, and I had put in a square piece of bark, knowing the tarantula would want something to hide under during the day, and it has now dug out a hole beneath the piece of bark. That's where it was hiding out when we poured in the crickets. The next morning I looked in and there were only two or three crickets left. Now, did they bury themselves in the gravel? Did the tarantula eat them all in one wild gorge? If it ate them all, it was in the dark so we did not see it.

That was not very satisfying. So we went back to the pet store and bought some big half-grown crickets. The next morning I looked in, and noticed that the spider was still out from his hideaway (is it taming down?), and though we did not see it make a kill, there were scattered parts of slaughtered crickets strewn about, and there it was holding one while s/he devoured it.

 

So I would not have to turn it loose out of guilt that I was starving it. And anyway, I have just now read that their metabolism is so low that they can go months, if not years, without eating a bite.

This blog is dedicated to my good friend Carter Patteson.

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.

 

 

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.