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.

 

Gila Monsters

 When we moved here, and the wildlife began to reveal itself to us creature by creature, one that we hoped for was the Gila Monster. We knew these big colorful lizards, one of three species of venomous lizards in the world, were found here, but we didn't know where to search for them. They only spend 15 percent of their life above the earth. How could we possibly be looking that way just as they popped up their head? But in fact one day one was walking up the ditch on the left side of the yard, then there was one on the porch. Then we noticed several quail gathered tightly together attentively following something and when we looked at them with the binoculars we could see they were following a Gila Monster.. And that is how it has been since. We don't search for them. In summer they simply present themselves to us when we are not expecting.

They are so tame and slow-moving, and make such wonderful subjects, that we photographed every one we saw. Though they all looked similar, actually each had its own pattern, and we realized that by closely examining each photo we could tell if we were looking at a new one, or the same one we saw yesterday, and with a little work we could decide how many different Gila Monsters we had here.

Well, it wasn't a little work, it was a lot of work, which is why I didn't do it last year, but this year I have finally got down to it. One problem is, the right and left side are completely different from each other, so we have to be careful to photo both halves, and then keep the photos together so we knew they were the same individual. Let me show you how it works.

If you look in the center of the picture on the right side of this Gila you will see a mark that looks like "3." Now look at the same Gila in approximately the same place on its left side, you will see something that looks like a lower case "g." From now on, if you get a good look, you will always be able to recognize this individual.

Let me give another example.

The middle of the right side of the tail has two black "1's" against the orange background, and then at the base of the tail something sort of like the letter "A." Now look at the left side of this same individual. The base of the tail has a black "1." Next out is a black square, and finally a black "?."

We have seen some of these in 2019, 2020, and now again in 2021. And now to gather all our dozens of pictures together to estimate the total number of Gila Monsters found  in our yard. 

Alas, we only seem to have seen these two!

Juggling

We love all the wildlife here, but unfortunately the wildlife doesn't love each other, and since we use meal worms to attract everything right up to our house, we end up having to do a lot of juggling to keep the worst enemies separated from each other. We're not always successful.

We especially like the carnivores, and realize we have to have prey animals on our land to feed them, and that is all right with us. The prey animals are more numerous, and generally have less charisma, than the carnivores. The trouble comes when the big carnivores want to feed on the smaller carnivores. 

Here's how it shakes out. Cooper's Hawk is a major predator and mainly feeds on the larger birds like doves and quail, and ground squirrels, all animals with enough meat on them to be worth the effort it takes to catch them. We have tons of quail and doves and squirrels, so that is as it should be.

Bobcats I believe take mostly rabbits, which is what we also have lots of. When I have found their kills, the bobcats have eaten all but ends of the legs, and a sack of entrails, just as a cat would leave after eating a mouse.

Coyotes are more opportunistic. Family parties often trot through on a broad front so one coyote can chase a rabbit or other small animal across to be intercepted by a coyote on the other side, or anyway that is what they seem to be doing. Also they eat carrion.

But here is where we begin to have problems. In our first year here, when we sat out on our back porch with our morning coffees and tossed out meal worms we quickly began to attract lizards, handsome big Desert Spiny Lizards, doing pushups and showing off their deep chests as they competed for worms, and  narrow Whiptail Lizards that ran across the porch chasing each other and reaching such speeds that their front legs lifted off the ground. These all quickly tamed enough to take the worms out of our fingers.

 

The everyday small birds came too, Cactus Wrens and Curve-billed Thrashers, seasonally White-crowned Sparrows and Yellow-rumped Warblers, our little bunch of 3-4 species of hummingbirds, all smallish and not of much interest to carnivores.

Then one day a roadrunner came, and, offered meal worms, immediately became our tamest bird, that sat in our laps as long as the worms were coming, that followed us from window to window if we didn't come outside soon enough. What do you suppose they eat when they aren't getting worms? lizards.

  So there was already a bit of tension when our lizards were out, and one, and now increasingly, two roadrunners, suddenly arrived. Usually the lizards quickly slipped into hiding. And the roadrunners had their own worries. Sometimes the roadrunners would look intently up in the sky, then freeze where they were standing, and we would get up and look the way they were looking, and there would be the Harris's Hawk sitting in the top of the pine tree, and there was instant distrust between them. 

Then there was a new thing, because the two roadrunners were male and female and the male would catch a lizard, and shake it sideways to attract the female's attention, then come after the female shaking the lizard, and the female would take off running away, but beginning to slow down. And now sometimes, as he was running after her, he would jump high in the air, and that must have been part of the show, and then they  would mate for a long time, and only when he was finished would he hand her the lizard.

 

Sometimes when he didn't have a lizard he would hand her a bit of stick, which presumably was meant to suggest the beginning of a nest. Then we could see now they were nesting on a huge growth of mistletoe over our front door, and after a while when we gave them a meal worm they didn't eat it themselves, but they would take as many in their mouth as they could without dropping them all, and carry them around to the nest, which meant they were feeding young. We read that they could have up to ten babies and we wondered how they would handle that. Would they bring them all to the porch together? The parents weren't just carrying them worms, they were also decimating the lizards to feed them. We had noticed that if we looked over the house across the street into some tall mesquites a pair of Harris's hawks were mating, perhaps thinking of building a nest. 

There was a commotion over our front door. It was the Harris's Hawk, We chased it away, but it had already cleared out the roadrunner nest of its nestlings.

On Scorpions

 I don't know what it says about my character that people think Scorpions make perfectly appropriate gifts for me, but they do. The species I usually end up with is the Stripe-tailed Scorpion. It's the commonest species around, its not dangerous, it tends to eat whatever you offer it, from meal worms to whatever dead insects you pick up. I kept one for over a  year once, until one day I found it dead. For all I know that's how long they live. (Note in the picture the stripes in the tail.)

The scorpion is the iconic desert creature. Jillian Cowles, in her opulent and very complete book Amazing Arachnids, has pictures and discussion of the twenty species of scorpions found in Arizona. Since arriving in Arizona a couple of years ago I had acquired a scorpion from time to time, and I admit, even using the big photographs in her book, I have had a very hard time identifying any of the species. I didn't have much luck in getting them to feed, either, so I finally turned them loose. Also they often seemed to have rather slender pincers, which was in the description of the very venomous Bark Scorpion, a species we had not yet seen, and for all we knew these were Bark Scorpions, which Cheryl didn't want to have around the house, since our very inquisitive and hands-on four-year-old grandson regularly spent time here.

That brings us up to date.

My daughter-in-law's mother found a scorpion in her house and, thinking I might want it, saved it in a jar, and asked her daughter to ask me if I would like to have it. Just in case it might be something unusual I said I certainly would like to see it, so my  daughter-in-law brought it to me.

 "Is it just a Stripe-tailed?" she asked.

Yes," I answered, scarcely glancing at it, and tipped it out into an empty aquarium. Since scorpions like to hide out of sight during the day, I put in a gnarled piece of bark for it to hide under. Later, someone else wanted to see it, so I reached into the aquarium with my hand and picked up the piece of bark and turned it over so we could see the markings on the scorpion's back and get our first chance to identify it. But instead of sitting on the ground under the bark it had turned upside down so it could cling to the "roof" of the piece of bark, so we still couldn't see its back.

That night after I went to bed it suddenly occurred to me that the Bark Scorpion, the dangerous one, was noted for hanging upside down on the "ceiling"of whatever it was it had taken shelter under, and suddenly I was trying to remember if I had closed the lid of the aquarium carefully, or if I had closed my study door so the cat would not hear something rustling in the aquarium and go in and try to tip it over, something it had done before.

  It didn't bother me enough to cause me to get up and investigate, but when I woke the next morning I went straight in and, using a stick rather than my fingers this time, I turned it up and examined it carefully, and sure enough it was a Bark Scorpion.

Bark Scorpions, like the Stripe-Tailed, are one of the few that are identifiable at sight, though in this case it is because they are so sinister looking (unless it's just because you know their sting has caused deaths, at least in old people in poor health). Here's what they look like.

You can make them even more sinister, if you know that they fluoresce. If you shine an ultra-violet light on them they shine up even more eerily (plus that is the easiest way to find a scorpion in the dark.) 

I enjoy having this one but since I can't get it to eat anything, in the end I will have to let it go. What I'll do (once I get it into a jar to carry it) is I will take it down to the bottom of our land and release it in a tangle of cholla (and hope we don't hear later that our neighbor was stung).
 

The Coming Year

I finished my last blog bemoaning the fact that the special birds, the ones we had fed and tamed all winter, now that spring has arrived have deserted us without a backward glance. A fiery purple-faced Costa's Hummingbird that had been coming several times a day to our feeder, was the last to go.

 

Well, on reflection I decided I was going too far. I had forgotten one of the most dramatic, most faithful birds, an all-year bird, the tamest (it will sit in our laps while it swallows meal worms we give it), and, at the end of the season it will bring its young-of-the-year to show them how to collect the free-meal worms; the bird that is most enjoyable for visitors to watch from closeup as it races around under our feet: Our Road Runner. I will indeed be back talking about it because this year it was a pair and they showed us their whole courtship and now have built their nest in a knot of mistletoe over our front door. We will want to follow all the developments.

And as it happens, the first new creature of the year running towards us to take meal worms from our fingers is not a bird but a reptile: a beautiful Spiny Lizard.

I'm quite sure it was one returning from last year, as it already knew where to go to get the meal worms. And the first of our Gila Monsters has come out of hibernation, perhaps as we were looking at it, and we watched it taking a monstrous drink, perhaps its first drink of the year. So far we haven't learned how to feed them, but judging by last year they will hang around anyway. We hear that at this time of year, counting on the fat stored in their tail, they are less interested in food, and more interested in finding a mate.

And of course who knows what totally unexpected birds or reptiles will show up. I should know that. That's the real fun.

I'm (Mostly) Happy Winter is Leaving

 Winter is my least favorite season here in Tucson. It's not the weather, which is mild enough. In fact it might be more reasonable to wait for torrid summer temperatures to relent. After all, in winter all you need to do is put on a sweater, then you can go out and enjoy the fresh out-of-doors. Harder to do in summer when it is 115 outside. Well, that's the kind of thing people say.

But I've always loved summer. I think it was because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a kid I was always disappointed with our summer. All I wanted to do was jump out of bed in the morning and go out looking for snakes and spiders and insects. But before I got up I would wait in bed sampling the air in the house. If it smelled of heated dust rising from the top of the furnace, it could only mean the central heating had been going all night, and that would mean the cold drenching fog was in, and probably would be in at least till noon which killed most of the day. No living thing would be stirring.

It's nothing like that here.When it gets to be summer, it pretty dependably stays summer. And when it is 115, well, we live on a cul-de-sac off the Catalina Highway, and we can get in the car and drive to Inspiration Pt. at 7,000 feet, in 45 minutes, where the temperature is a balmy 80.

No, it's winter I don't care as much for. It's not for the most part terribly cold, but the birds aren't singing and everything sort of shuts down. By the time we get up to our favorite Inspiration Point there is often a bitter wind blowing.

But there is or there might be a problem this fast-approaching summer. You see, it is at the change of season that new birds come down from the mountain top, or new birds come up from Mexico. But it works the other way, and we may lose birds, too.The last couple of years a hummingbird has moved in along the bushes on the front side of our house, and we got to watch it making a nest and raising a young bird, and we got to watch the whole operation directly out the window. Each time, it was a Broad-billed Hummingbird, and each time it only laid one egg, when usually I believe hummingbirds have two young, and each time it was very tame, and all this made us think it was the same bird--our bird. Also it had what looked like a bent bill from crashing head-on into a window sometime in the past. Our nickname for it was Broken Bill (rather inappropriate since only female hummingbirds build a nest and raise young). I had some close up hummingbird nest photography planned this summer, but so far there is no bird hanging around in the bushes there.

 

 

And we had already lost two birds. First of all, for the last few months we had had a tame Bewick's Wren that we were very fond of. When we got up in the morning and went into the breakfast room, it was already waiting for us looking in the window, its long tail twitching back and forth. We would pick up a small handful of meal worms and carry them outside. As soon as we opened the backdoor it would rush back to a spot peeking out from a behind a bush waiting for us, and it would shoot around and grab every meal worm we threw it, and it would rush back around behind the bush (for some reason it would always insist on eating in privacy. It was so small it had trouble swallowing the worm, and it was as though it were embarrassed to have us see its awkwardness). After it swallowed each one it would come back out from behind the bush and wait for the next one. After five or six its tiny stomach would be full, and it would go on about its business.

 

 

 

And a second bird was hanging around that we got used to seeing every day, a Lincoln's Sparrow, a very pretty, very precisely marked bird.

 

 

 And now on a single day both Bewick's Wren and Lincoln's Sparrow have left, taking off for wherever they go in summer, which is not here.

 

So maybe some very special bird will suddenly appear and stay with us for the winter, but for the moment we don't have any special bird, just all the usual ones, and we feel sort of bereft.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Many Hummingbirds?

 When we first moved in here we put up bird feeders, with grain or suet for the regular birds, and with sugar water for the hummingbirds. I was especially interested in what hummingbirds we would get. I had always lived in northern places where you could expect one species regularly, with perhaps another species that would make a wrong turn in migration and occasionally appear in the midst of winter. I was sure Tucson, deep in the southwest, would turn up more variety.

We quickly learned we had three evidently year-round species, Anna's, Costa's and Broad-billed. The adult males of all three were brilliantly colored in breeding plumage, so we couldn't complain about the selection we had drawn. I had never before lived in a place that had so many species. But like a typical birdwatcher, I wasn't satisfied. I wanted more than three.

 

 

 

The thing that galled me is, I had almost certainly seen another species, and a real rarity to boot. Not long after we had moved in, I woke up early one morning and walked through the quiet house to one of our feeders outside a window, and there was a hummingbird on it. What I noticed at once is it had a strongly curved bill, and though I couldn't remember its name, I knew there was such a bird, and it was very special. Adult male hummingbirds usually have bright colors that serve to identify them, but sub-adult,  or female birds, often don't have distinctive marks and can be difficult to identify. This was one of those drabber birds, but I tried to memorize any marks I could see on it.

It flew away before I could wake up Cheryl to witness it with me. And it never occurred to me to try to photograph it. I looked up the books, which told me the bird I thought it was was the Lucifer Hummingbird. The special mark I had memorized was that the throat was pure white (hummingbird throats are often spotted or brightly colored), and that low down  on the throat were two or three dark, lozenge marks.

The bird I saw was exactly like the illustration of the sub-adult male Lucifer Hummingbird in The Sibley Guide to Birds, Second Edition (p. 298). I have never again seen a bird like that. But I was too new at looking at the hummingbirds here to trust my judgment. So, I was still at three species.

But then I began seeing a brownish species I couldn't make head or tails of, and I sent a picture I had taken of it to bird-watcher neighbors who in turn sent it to their friend who happened to be the author of the Peterson Guide to Hummingbirds of North America and she said it was a Black-chinned Hummingbird, and so that was my fourth species, and indeed I have now seen adult male Black-chinned examples that I can ID myself (though one has still never stopped so I could photo it).

 

 

 There is a species  (Broad-tailed Hummingbird) I thought I would never record on my property, because it stays up at the top of the mountains and never comes down, but the other day one, perhaps in migration up from Mexico, did travel through our yard, and spent two or three days coming to the feeders in our backyard, and even let me take a picture of it. It is a handsome bird with a bright red throat with a white bib beneath it, and a green crown to set off the throat and bib, and that is the fifth species, and a clear moral that if you wait patiently, new species will go on showing up. Who knows, one day even the Lucifer.

 

Coyotes

I expect most people know that wolves and coyotes have bushy tails that hang straight down, whereas by the time dogs were domesticated, they had acquired a gene that made their tales curve up at the end. Every few days from one to three coyotes (often, what looks like a pair with a younger one) come trotting up from the wash at the bottom of our land, crossing through the back yard at a wide front so only one would be visible at a time. A rabbit, seeing it, might be tricked into fleeing to the side and running straight into the others.  Invariably they come just as we are not expecting them, traveling so fast they are gone before I can find my camera, so I have never managed to record them but get only a quick sense of surprise at how large they look ("Like wolves!" I can't help shouting to Cheryl), and a sense of admiration for the wild look of their plump hanging tails. They have wonderful coats at this time of year.

Well, the other day I got my chance. It was that day late in February when the round-tailed ground-squirrels came up from their burrows for their first day out of hibernation, and while they were still possibly confused by the sudden sun-brightness a family of coyotes was frantically trying to dig them out. While they were occupied with that I was close-up beside them with my camera clicking away trying to make their tails the center of my pictures.

A Puzzle that May (or May Not) be Solved

Not long after we moved to Tucson (June, 2018) we were sitting at the breakfast table having breakfast and looking out the window over our extensive back yard, when Cheryl with her sharp eyes suddenly said "There's a tarantula and a tarantula hawk fighting." 

This, of course, is one of the nature-photographer's Grails. We grabbed our cameras and ran down there. (I paced it off later, and she had spotted them when they were seventy-five feet away).

They were racing around each other in an area dug-over by ground-squirrels. One move I recall the spider making was to get up on its tiptoes and make a sort of floating run across the bank. Then everything stopped and stayed frozen, and we realized we might have been interfering with the action and so we backed off. When we cautiously returned a few minutes later, nobody was there. So that was frustrating. We didn't know if we had seen everything, or missed everything.

It stayed like that until recently, when I read something that surprised, and sort of disillusioned, me. The desert blond tarantula (Aphonopelma chalcodes) with a leg span of four inches, is a major predator capable of capturing mice and other small vertebrates; the tarantula hawk (Pepsis mexicanus) has a sting that can put a person to bed for a couple of days with a fever. I imagined the two of them would fight head to head, kicking and scratching, rolling over and over. But what I read was, the wasp, being careful not to get too close, stings the spider on the tip of its leg, then gets out of the way while the spider falls over paralyzed from the venom. 

Did we see it, but just not recognize what we were seeing? I got out the photographs we took then and looked at them newly to see what I could make of them.

Here is the wasp.

Here is the wasp in a position from which it might have stung the tarantula in its second leg.

Here is the tarantula in a position in which it is apparently no longer moving. It has withdrawn its second leg.

We have not witnessed a spider/wasp conflict since.