Changing how people view and treat snakes
Around our home, the most commonly seen snakes are Eastern Patch-noseds, the high-elevation sister species of Western Patch-nosed Snakes. Like their lowland cousins, Whiptail Lizards are a staple of their known diet, so we assumed that was what the one we spotted was after as he diligently excavated a burrow in our yard one June …
On a balmy August night, Melissa and I headed up a canyon near our home. We had explored this area during the day, but recent night visits revealed orb-weaver spiders, rattlesnakes and vinegaroons hunting under cover of night. Though the pine forest air cools off quickly after sunset, rocky canyonsides hold heat a bit longer, …
A snake’s scaled snout pokes forth from a crag recess and feels its first direct rays of sun in months. Her body remains in passage, still nearly as cold as the contents of your refrigerator. After months in her dark retreat, her now-warming head, the seat of most information sensing and processing, must be overwhelmed …
A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 6 Read: A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 5 After a late night of surveilling wild snakes, I get outside mid-morning on the off-chance I can find one of our subjects sunning in the damp vegetation. With all the difficulty we’ve had in keeping up with them …
A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 5 Read: A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 4 What would a downpour do to Carol’s scent trail? It’s already been a couple of days since she passed over the ground here – did Daryl miss his chance at love, at least for now? The ground is …
A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 4 Read: A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 3 The day Carol showed up, we checked under the truck bed liner to find Daryl still coiled in a hunting posture under its downhill edge. “There are two lepidus in the yard…” we would say to one another …
A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 3 Read: A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 2 The day Carol revealed herself to us, consuming a whiptail on our doorstep, she ended up on the far side of the garage, under an old metal sheet. As night fell, I cast a dim light under her …
A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 2 Read: A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 1 The bike ride was hard, and now I was hungry. I set up the solar oven outside our front entrance to preheat, and flopped onto the couch. Not 10 minutes had gone by when I returned outside with …
A Tale of Two Trash Snakes Part 1 Well into our second summer, we didn’t have much hope left that we’d moved to serpent’s paradise. We had traded the city for the Gila National Forest with high hopes of snakes on our doorstep, but with each passing, snakeless day, we questioned whether our forested, northern …
Ecologists study how interactions between species affect populations. Trophic (feeding) interactions are the most obvious (e.g., lions eat zebras), but competition and mutualism are also important in structuring populations residing together. Food webs consider how seemingly non-interacting populations of species may influence each other indirectly, often through the actions of other species. How individuals interact …