Changing how people view and treat snakes
On a humid Sonoran Desert evening we met up with Roger Repp and Gordon Schuett at their study site along with some old friends from near and far. Wandering the washes, we find a juvenile desert rodent stumbling out of a hackberry bush into the dry stream channel. It turns at our approach and manages …
28 April: Molly basks briefly before leaving the security of the den to fulfill what is on every rattlesnake’s mind: the first meal of the year. It’s been over seven months since they’ve last had a chance to eat, so they’re probably quite hungry. Molly comes out first and coils on the left. The snake …
Halfway between Tucson and Phoenix, a crumbling granite hillside gives way to a cactus-studded alluvial plain. Small, sandy washes break up this landscape and facilitate the growth of desert trees. Here, the western diamondbacked rattlesnake flourishes during times of plenty and, in leaner times, retreats to refuges to idle until conditions improve. In February of …
Memorial Day Weekend 2010. Alice is a big, beautiful, dark female Arizona black rattlesnake with mustard yellow scales outlining each dorsal blotch. We first encountered her ~20 meters from a known rattlesnake den. Several of our party walked right by before we discovered her, coiled at an opening beneath a boulder, without her rattling or …
In 2010, we initiated a study of social behavior in Arizona black rattlesnakes (Crotalus cerberus) at sites where they aggregate. Here is a preview of our videos. Surveillance and timelapse videos taken at Arizona black rattlesnake hibernacula. Timelapse videos created with the PlantCam by Wingscapes and Adobe® After Effects® CS4 software. This first short video …
Are aggregations of Arizona black rattlesnakes stable and complex social groups? Read More »