Although I was born in the East I grew up in Arizona and quite early I discovered that there were plenty of creatures I would never have seen in my original home - kangaroo rats, jack rabbits, desert iguanas, coral snakes, gila monsters and many others, among them the fabled rattlesnake! In the Southwest there was not just one, but nearly a dozen species. My first introduction to these amazing creatures may have been after a rare late winter downpour had emblazoned the sandy desert above the Gila River Valley with white primroses, desert lilies and pink sand verbena. The year was 1954 and it was a while after I had been taken to see Disney's "The Living Desert" at the local drive in theater in 1953. My parents and I stopped to look at the flowers and I saw a desert iguana run down a hole. For some reason (my father was not often that generous) Dad volunteered to dig the lizard out for me - I was in a "reptile phase" of my interest in natural history. He dug down about a foot and followed the burrow laterally a few feet. Suddenly a black "tail" appeared sticking out of the sand and my father reached down to grab it, but I yelled for him to stop. I recognized the black "tail" as a rattlesnake tongue, which I had seen in the movie! The snake soon emerged and showed itself to be an adult Crotalus atrox, or western diamondback! I got rare praise from my father that day and the incident stuck in my mind because of it.
Over the years I have seen dozens of rattlesnakes in the wild and even more in zoos. In the wild they still thrill me, but I have never wanted to keep them alive, as several of my friends did. I learned about their pit organs that allow them to sense infrared and the fact that one meal can hold them for weeks. I have only ever killed one- a young western diamondback I found under a board near the front door of a house in Tucson the day I moved in. It became a specimen for an amateur herpetologist friend. Oddly the very day I moved out I saw another, this time adult, diamondback in the yard. This time I left it for the next tenant to deal with. In between (five years) I never saw a rattlesnake in the yard! Other snakes I have either ignored or moved. Interestingly both my major professor at the University of Arizona and my former department head both hated rattlesnakes and would kill them whenever they saw them.
Perhaps my favorite rattlesnake is the blacktail (Crotalus molossus). I first encountered this beautiful reptile on a hike with a friend in Palm Canyon in the Kofa Mountains of Yuma County, Arizona. It was a cold day in November and my friend and I were bundled up with fairly heavy jackets. We had taken a side trip to a remote canyon where I could see a desert fan palm (Washingtonia filifera) with a full "petticoat" of dead fronds. Since years before some botanist had called the Arizona fan palms "self pruning" I wanted to photograph this individual. We got up to the palm with some effort, but on the way down as I rounded a sizable boulder I heard the now familiar buzz of a rattler! Not hardly believing my ears I peered under the boulder and there coiled in the base of the rock was a beautiful example of the black-tailed rattler!
Blacktails also figured in several other adventures in the Southwest. Among these were the very angry adult blacktail that an associate and I found crossing the road at Patagonia, Arizona; the nearly invisable sleeping blacktail at Chiricahua National Monument that another associate nearly put his hand on (it blended in well with the lichen-covered rock!); the blacktail that my major professor disturbed in a sotal near Paradise (also in the Chiricahuas), and the very shy blacktail at South Fork of Cave Creek (also in the Chiricahuas!) that would not let me photograph it (it kept putting its head under its coils!)
Sidewinders (Crotalus cerastes) were common where I grew up and, although I seldom saw them, their characteristic tracks were often encountered. I did transport one cold sidewinder that I found under a hay bale near a house back to the desert. I have always admired these nearly unique vipers (there are similar vipers- minus rattles- in African deserts), especially for their sidewinding method of traveling on sand. The horn-like scales over their eyes are an added exotic feature.
I have had further adventures with western diamondbacks, one in which I nearly stepped on a sleeping adult in broad daylight along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and several seen on a trip to Presidio County Texas. These creatures are always impressive and easily stirred up. Although very dangerous, they are not quite as deadly as the similar Mojave rattler (Crotalus scutulatus), which I have only seen in zoos.
Mojave Rattlesnake - captive in Arizona.
On the other hand I have had intimate acquaintance with the prairie rattler (Crotalus viridis) and have seen at least a dozen at one time or another. Several were visible crawling across the lava rocks at Mt. Dora in New Mexico when I was running a transect just before sunset one summer, I almost literally ran into an individual on the Jornada del Muerto (never saw a snake rise so high compared to its length!), and one individual near San Antonio, New Mexico, let me know in no uncertain terms that I was getting too close! See photo below.
Prairie Rattlesnake on the Jornada del Muerto.
On Mt. Palomar, California, a friend and I ran into the Pacific form of the prairie rattler and it was by far the most difficult rattler I have ever had to deal with. We were trying to shoo it off the busy highway leading to the observatory and it seemed to prefer fighting. We finally succeeded, but I decided that I much prefered the more docile blacktail to this fiery beast. Still it was quite beautiful.
While I was in Florida I never saw a rattlesnake in the wild, although I was always on the alert for the eastern diamondback (Crotalus adamanteus) - the largest of the rattlesnakes. One friend caught a pigmy (Sistrurus miliarius), one of three species in the genus Sistrurus. I took several photos of it, one of which is below.
Pygmy Rattlesnake - Florida.
Rattlesnakes have their place in the wild. Yes they can be dangerous, but so can automobiles (and a lot more so). They eat a large number of rodents (a speciality of rattlesnakes - hence the pit organs) and in areas where "rattlesnake roundups" are held the rodent populations can get out of hand. Beside gasoline is often used to force rattlesnakes out of their dens and this is certainly a bad idea from an environmental standpoint. See the Position Paper on Rattlesnake Roundups of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists at http://www.asih.org/.... Rattlesnakes can be admired when you find them, from a distance! Always be careful in snake country and never put your hands or feet where you cannot see. Respect the snakes and their habitat and there is much less danger from their bites.
All photographs by me!