Category: Reptiles

Baby Turtle, a Giant Bug, Hidden Rattlesnake, and More

9/13/2020 The past week has brought us many fascinating sights and sounds here in our southeastern Arizona landscape. One of my neighbors discovered a very young ornate box turtle on his property just a few days ago. For almost two decades, I have been seeing ornate box turtles in this valley, but something soon became puzzling about them. 

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Box turtles this tiny are a very rare sight locally. Box turtle photos courtesy of Gilbert Urias.

In all my time here, I have yet to see a single individual that is not of adult size. No hatchlings, no young, no pint-sized box turtles. I have thought for some time that they have been having trouble reproducing successfully in this area, so these images are nice to see! 

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A giant mesquite bug, clinging to my screen door. The “screening” is actually 1/8-inch hardware cloth, giving a good depiction of the scale of this lumbering insect.

A giant mesquite bug (Thasus neocalifornicus) appeared on our screen door. This actually is a true bug, a Hemipteran. The growth stages of this large insect involve several iterations as bright red social nymphs. Only in their final stage of their development do these insects become solitary and grow wings that enable flight.

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Mike the Raven came to visit us this morning, as always. A full essay about him and his mate, Mavis, appears in my new book, The Life of the San Pedro River.

This has been a stellar week for bird sightings. Many migrant species are passing through, or arriving to spend the winter. Among the new arrivals here the past week have been calliope, rufous, Allen’s, broad-tailed, and Anna’s hummingbirds, Nashville, black-throated gray, Townsend’s, Virginia’s, and Wilson’s warblers, lazuli, varied, and indigo buntings,  Brewer’s, clay-colored, vesper, chipping, and savannah sparrows, a lark bunting, and more. This morning, as always, our resident pair of ravens, Mike and Mavis, came to visit, along with a female Cooper’s hawk that spent many minutes bathing in one of our bird watering dishes. 

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This Cooper’s hawk arrived during mid-morning to scatter a group of feeding songbirds.

Cooper’s hawks are exceptionally agile, quick, alert predators that fly with more than enough finesse to catch songbirds on the wing in dense cover. When small birds go to sleep for the night, Cooper’s hawks must color their nightmares! 

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Perched in a velvet mesquite tree, the hawk dried and preened its feathers.
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Not far from where the hawk was bathing, this western diamondback rattlesnake lay coiled in a typical, circular resting position, not easy to see in the undergrowth.

Our days have been very hazy this week, the sunsets a surreal deep, dusky orange, even the moon has glazed over with smoky orange hues. For Arizonans, the smoke-filled skies are a daily reminder of the horrors that are transpiring in neighboring California as the worst fire season in history wreaks utter havoc across the state. My heart goes out to all Californians, for I know what it is like to suddenly leave home not knowing if it will be there upon our return. Huge wildfires and evacuations were a part of our lives more than a few times when we lived in Montana. May the people of California stay out of harm’s way, and may the rains come!

An Amazing Morning with Two Rare Desert Tortoises

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This old desert tortoise was moved off a potentially dangerous roadway. Slow-moving reptiles like this ancient specimen risk their lives on roads that traverse their habitats.

9/3/20 An amazing morning! Two desert tortoises! Around 8:30am, Gilbert came driving up our driveway to tell me that a tortoise was crawling down the Cascabel Road. I followed him back down our driveway on foot; when I got to the road, I could immediately see a large tortoise about 80 feet to the east. Gilbert told me that the tortoise had been walking right down the road, not crossing it. That is a very dangerous habit for such a creature, as there is no shortage of half-wit, high-speed drivers who roar down the road daily at excessive speeds, churning up great clouds of dust and killing plenty of creatures that cannot get out of the way in time.

The tortoise was an adult, 11-12 inches in length, the second largest one I had ever seen. I gently picked it up and placed it off of the road, pointing it toward the safety of Charlie Thomas’s bosque.

Amazing. In all the yards we have lived here, we have never had a sighting of  a desert tortoise on our land. I walked back home, then sat down with Kath under the ramada to watch birds. Incredibly, some ten minutes later I swept my gaze across the woodland to the north, and there, not 50 feet away, was a second adult tortoise!! This one was 9-10 inches in length. We photographed it at a distance so as to minimize disturbing the animal. I watched as it walked northward, disappearing onto Elna’s land as it crossed under the fence line. 

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Our first desert tortoise sighting on our property!

These tortoises have a very different manner of walking than the ornate box turtles we have been seeing every day here of late. Box turtles sort of shuffle along, dragging their plastrons on the ground. Desert tortoises raise themselves high off of the ground as they travel, extending their powerful legs so that their plastrons are elevated; the adult that we watched heading north held its plastron a good 3 inches above the ground as it walked.

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An ornate box turtle that visited us on the same morning. These turtles walk in a very different manner than their larger cousins, desert tortoises.

Western Diamondbacks Making Love in My Shed

Three days ago, I awoke in the morning to find an interesting story written in the fine dusty soil that forms the floor of a three-sided outdoor shed on our property. One side of the building is open and often attracts snakes to enter, where they find hiding places in the shady interior. A look at the ground told me that a pair of rattlesnakes had been courting and possibly mating there the night prior. I spotted them shortly thereafter, only a few feet away, resting together. As I watched, the male snake would crawl over the top of the female while making short, forward jabs of his chin along her back. These snakes have evolved a very tactile courtship behavior. If stimulated for a sufficient length of time, the female will usually allow the male to mate. Viable sperm is stored in the female to produce young the following spring. Western diamondbacks also mate in the spring and give birth later in summer. What amazed me about this pair was that this courtship has continued for nearly three days! 

  • The female is partially obscured and at rest here, as the male continues to crawl over her...
    The female is partially obscured and at rest here, as the male continues to crawl over her…
  • The track patterns that appeared in the morning strongly suggested that they were made by courting diamondbacks.
    The track patterns that appeared in the morning strongly suggested that they were made by courting diamondbacks.