The snake pictured above is a black-tailed rattlesnake, Crotalus molossus. Of the nine species of rattlesnakes inhabiting Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, this one is my favorite. (If you don’t see the image, it is because you are reading this in your email. Click on the blog’s title to be redirected to my blog website for a better, more inclusive experience. Once there, simply scroll down the title page to quickly find this most recent post.)
If snakes could talk, when asked the question “what is hell?,” they would likely answer “any place where people are.” Many people kill snakes on sight, and others run them over with vehicles – often a brutal, intentional action. If snakes have dreams, surely one of their worst nightmares would involve becoming entangled in certain types of fencing, like chicken wire or plastic mesh. A snake can slip its head through the openings in these kinds of fencing easily. The trouble comes as the reptile moves forward. As the body thickens behind the neck, there comes a point when the snake becomes trapped. Scales on snakes overlap and point backward. The wire or plastic mesh gets caught under the scales, making it impossible for the snake to back out. A long, slow death is the inevitable outcome. I have seen live and dead snakes trapped in fencing more than a few times, especially in chicken wire and in various types of plastic mesh and bird netting. The bottom line is simple: if you care about snakes, don’t use these types of fencing! Find another way.
Late this summer, a neighbor called requesting my help to free this 4-foot Sonoran whipsnake, (Masticophis bilineatus). The snake was badly entangled in some plastic mesh fencing. It took quite some time with a pair of small scissors to free the snake. This feisty whipsnake tried to bite me repeatedly during the delicate procedure.
Sonoran whipsnakes are among the desert’s most beautiful reptiles. They are capable of incredibly fast movements much like their cousins, the coachwhips. Large, capable eyes give this creature excellent long-range vision for hunting its prey and avoiding predators. These snakes are semi-arboreal, often found high in the mesquite trees, where they move with skilled grace in search of lizards and bird nests. This one had skin that felt like fine silk, remarkably smooth to the touch.
October brought this 3-foot Sonoran gopher snake to our residence. I have never seen gopher snakes as richly colored as the individuals I have encountered in this river valley. They are Arizona’s longest ophidians, (reaching lengths exceeding eight feet) and they are always more than welcome here. Few predators are more adept at capturing mice, rats, and pocket gophers, for these animals can do what most other predators cannot – they can crawl down into the rodents’ burrows. Nowhere else have I seen box turtles as gorgeously marked as our local variety. This is an adult – some of these turtles lose their stripes, fading to a solid brown as they get older, but not this one. The species is Terapene ornata, otherwise known as the ornate box turtle.
Yet another Gila monster visited our property this year. This one was an adult measuring close to 14 inches in length. These lizards are readily identifiable as distinct individuals, for their complex markings are never the same, somewhat like our fingerprints.The track of an opossum may be a common sight east of the Mississippi, but here it is something special. Most of the opossums in this valley are representatives of a Sierra Madrean subspecies, reaching the northern tip of their range here in SE Arizona. This distinctive footprint, along with others, appeared in the fine dust under my ramada early one morning.
Southern Arizona is among the top places in the nation for frequency of lightning strikes. Summer monsoon storms can be fierce and utterly unforgettable, particularly when they occur after dark. On the first day of September, a bolt slammed to the ground some 55 feet from where I had been seated. The bolt followed this upright support post on an open shed as it made its way downward. The carbonized streak is clearly visible on the post. The electromagnetic pulse from this strike fried our home telephone system.
The lightning bolt slammed into the ground with thousands of times the force and speed of a sledgehammer blow on an anvil. It struck so close to me that I heard no thunder, only the unmistakably loud, monstrously powerful “snap” that is characteristic of a bolt that hits far too near to its observer. I had been sitting on my bed reading when it happened; I knew instantly what had occurred, for this was not the first time that lightning had struck so close to me that no thunder could be heard. Many years as a guide in the wilderness mountains of Montana had brought me into near-contact with lightning along high ridges at timber line more than a few times. It is one of nature’s most lethal forces when it strikes living creatures, but the other side of lightning is that it is one of the world’s most quintessentially important life-giving phenomena. For the full story, see pages 204-205 in my book, The Life of the San Pedro River. The next morning, I found the place where the bolt had impacted. A tape measure revealed that the lightning had struck 53 feet away. The electromagnetic pulse from that bolt fried our telephone system and our computer router.
The storms of this year’s monsoon season in southern Arizona have been wonderful – thus far, our rain gauge has registered 9.56 inches of rain since mid-June, resulting in a grand resurgence of life all across this hot and formerly dry landscape.
On the morning of August 20, a serious storm pounded the ground with so much rain that the area around our buildings became an unbroken sheet of water. I could hear toads starting to call from our overflowing bird pond. Before long, dozens of spadefoot toads came out of their underground lairs to join in the party, all of them hopping and swimming through the flooded landscape in beelines toward the pond. This was a critical time for the amphibians, for in a normal year, they get only one or two brief chances to breed. It was also a rare sight, for I have never seen such activity in the daytime…but this was a doozy of a storm.
Mavis – the female half of the raven pair that we share habitat with – takes shelter from the storm under the roof of our shed.
As the rain subsided, I stepped outside. I heard the familiar roar of one of our local washes that had become engorged with flood water. A short walk of a quarter mile took me to a place where I could look down from the edge of a vertical cutbank at the flowing wash…
The view from the cutbank after 2.6 inches of rain from a single storm swelled Hot Springs Wash with roiling floodwaters. Only a single channel is visible in this image. The waters braided across the broad wash floor in an ever-changing – and growing – number of channels. Powerful floods are characteristic of desert washes with large drainage areas (this wash drains an area of about 100 square miles) and steep slopes in their headwater areas.
Next, I walked over to see what was going on in the little pond – there were eight pairs of Couch’s spadefoot toads in amplexus! A couple days later, after thousands of toad eggs hatched, our pond was teeming with wriggling throngs of tiny tadpoles.
Couch’s spadefoot toads mating in our pond. Each female usually lays hundreds of tiny eggs during such couplings, as the male releases sperm into the water.After the mating frenzy, myriad spadefoot eggs clung to every blade of grass afloat in the water.
Later in the day, Kathleen and I walked down the road to have a look at where the big wash crosses the road. The sound of the flood grew loud as we approached a point where we could see the flow, over 300 feet in width. The dirt road – the only road that serves the entire valley – had become impassable once again. In the midst of the turbulent flow, where the waters ran deepest, trees were being tossed around like toys, ripped from their root-bound moorings as they sped downslope toward the San Pedro River. Hundreds of tons of sediment, gravel, and rocks were being transported toward the floor of the valley in a rip-roaring tumult of rain water.
A view of the flood as it obliterated the roadway where it crosses the usually dry bed of Hot Springs Wash. During the twenty summers that I have seen this wash respond to rainfall events, only twice have I witnessed it running larger than this.
As we were watching the floodwaters, I climbed to a higher vantage point, where I discovered this beautiful Sonoran gopher snake. The snake allowed me to gently approach within a foot or so. This was a fine specimen, over 5 1/2 feet in length.
A few hours later, the sun had melted down into the nether regions of the western horizon. My wife and I walked outside around 11:00pm to listen to the night sounds. After turning off our flashlights, we witnessed something that is seldom seen here – fireflies!! Few of Earth’s creatures are capable of instilling such an immediate and compelling sense of awe and wonder as fireflies are. They were emitting distinctive, paired flashes of remarkably bright green light – in so doing, they identified themselves down to the species level. We were seeing southwestern synchronous fireflies, Photinus knulli.
A couple of days after the big storm, I walked down to the San Pedro River. Many areas within the river’s drainage had received substantial rains, bringing the river to life. Here, el Río is surging along with a flow roughly 180 feet in breadth and over six feet in depth.
Downstream, a group of turkey vultures was roosting in a pair of dead cottonwood trees. Dead trees are an essential and important component of all forested areas on Earth. All too often, humans fail to recognize this aspect of our planet’s ecology. Our culture – embedded in the ecologically dangerous Abrahamic concept of land use – (the land is here to produce our milk and honey, for human use) – tends to see dead trees as “going to waste.” “Salvage logging” of our national forests after wildfires is an exemplification this anthropocentric view of our living world.
The rainy season brings twilight flights of thousands of buprestid beetles just above the canopy of our local mesquite bosques. Here, a very rare sight unfolds as a female Polycesta aruentis everts her ovipositor to lay her delicate eggs deep within the sheltering crack of a mesquite stump, where they will be out of reach of the sun’s touch. Her larvae will hatch to bore their way through the wood, leaving tunnels in their wake that greatly facilitate the entry of fungi and other agents of decomposition. Thus, insects like this play a critically important role in forest ecology.
A half-grown (about four inches in length) Sonoran desert toad enjoys our bird pond after a rain. These amphibians grow to prodigious sizes. If I am not mistaken, they are the heaviest toads native to North America.
Living in remote parts of the desert southwest demands some important learned behaviors. Only fools step outside without looking first. This diamondback had just finished crawling across my entry steps when I took this photo. Snakes of all kinds are always welcome on our property – but continuous caution when one ventures outdoors is an imperative part of living here.
