A Bird Hunting Rattlesnake and a Dazzling Butterfly

What a day and what a week it has been here along the San Pedro River! I just finished freeing a live diamondback from a horrible tangle of plastic bird netting that a friend had put up to keep birds out of his garden. The netting, which resembles a plasticized version of chicken wire, works very well to keep out birds. Its downside is that it also traps snakes. Rattlesnakes are particularly vulnerable to such entrapment because their heads and necks are so much narrower than their midsections…the snakes slip through with their heads, but get caught as they try to squeeze their heavy bodies through. Snakes die slow, lingering deaths when trapped in this fashion. My wife Kathleen held the snake’s neck with tongs as I used a small pair of scissors to cut the tightly wrapped material from its body. True kindness extends beyond our human counterparts to all life, including toxic snakes.

Last week, one of our local rattlesnakes curled up at the edge of our bird pond and proceeded to wait for dinner. Many birds visit the pond daily. This was not the first time I have seen rattlesnakes hunting like this one, waiting at the edge of a water source for a feathered meal. An hour after I spotted the snake, I returned just in time to see a bird’s tail disappearing down its maw. I love watching birds and I welcome the songbirds that come to drink and bathe here, but if a snake decides it wants one for dinner, I will not interfere.

A few mornings prior, a pipevine swallowtail flew through our ramada to land in a nearby velvet mesquite. Only a scant few species of large butterflies that inhabit our nation are colored blue. This one is my favorite, for they are iridescent, gorgeous insects that have a very specialized relationship with a certain plant that grows here. I wrote an essay about that in my new book, The Life of the San Pedro River, starting on page 155.

New birds have kept appearing here during the past week as the autumn migration continues. Kathleen spotted – and quickly identified – a female painted bunting that visited us briefly for a single morning. We had never recorded that species here before. Female painted buntings are among our drabbest songbirds, with very few distinctive markings on their bodies…the males, however, are one of our most striking avian species, sporting a combination of bright blue, brilliant red, and iridescent green. Here in southeastern Arizona, painted buntings are at the very fringe of their natural range, thus they are seen quite rarely.