(Read Article on PawNation)

This somewhat misleading title on PawNation links to a rather interesting article on problems caused by letting exotic pets go into the wild.

This is actually old news.  But it’s a really good picture.

Personally, if I were a kid right now, I’d be excited about the prospect of going out to catch these babies in the wild.  What an awesome snake!

In the green grass
Over by a log
We notice black and white rings
“A kingsnake” says my friend
He bends down to grab
A tail where I see
A rattle

I yank him back
He does not believe
So I carefully handle
Scales rough and beautiful
Holding it eye level
It shows us its fangs
Of venom

From Poetry by Jerry J. Davis

This 10 foot wild python saw Patty Buntine’s Maltese terrier cross-breed, named Bindi, as food.

As you can tell by the terrier-sized lump in the snake’s tummy.

The dog’s owner is sad but not vindictive.  The snake gets to live, and in fact will be returned to the wild.

You can read the full story here:  Aussie Python Swallows Small Dog

I stumbled across this on Flickr…

Never seen a snake eating a goldfish before, at least not in the wild.

I think it’s a juvenile bull snake.

Actually, it’s the organization who runs The Orwell Prize that’s doing the blogging, publishing Orwell’s diaries exactly 70 years from the day each entry was written.

And in the very first post, George describes catching a snake.

That snake looks like what we used to call a ‘vine snake’ and they’re harmless.  It looks to be, officially, a "Rough Green Snake" (Opheodrys aestivus).  That’s my guess based upon the area where you found it, otherwise I’d eyeball it as a Smooth Green Snake.

Here, however, is a National Geographic article about a Australian Carpet Python who has a taste for golf balls:  Python Undergoes Golf Ball-ectomy

All the snakes I was familiar with were loners and they kept low to the ground, moving in the traditional slithering way of snakes. In contrast, these two held themselves up like cobras, and even when they crossed over into the tall grass I could see their little black heads darting back and forth, very alert. They saw me coming after them and zoomed quickly to a nearby tree.

There was nothing slow about these snakes. It didn’t take them more than a few seconds to slide right up that tree and into the branches. Then they did something really interesting: they froze.

The only reason I could see them in the tree is because I’d watched them climb. To anyone else they’d be invisible. Their bodies were telling the world, “We’re tree limbs! There’s nothing interesting here. Go about your business.” Even as I approached the tree they maintained this façade. Even as I began to climb.

There was one snake lower than the other, and so I moved carefully toward that one. It was thin and dark, and there were no obvious poison sacks on its head. I had an idea of what kind of snakes they were, but didn’t know for sure. I thought it was funny that it was going to stay there and let me grab it. I kept expecting it to shoot away. Lord knows that, on the ground, I would never have been able to catch it.

Okay, I thought. Here goes nothing.

I reached out and grabbed it as close to the head as I could, which wasn’t nearly close enough. The moment I touched it, the snake whipped its head around and bit me. It locked its jaws about four inches above my left wrist, and it hurt. I didn’t let go, but I was holding on to tree limbs with the other hand and couldn’t do anything about the snake. I had to climb down the tree one handed, even as blood began streaming down my arm and dripping from my elbow. I kept wondering if I was wrong – wondering if this was a poisonous species after all.

I slowly, carefully, made my way down the tree. Once on the ground I was able to grab the snake’s head and pull it off my arm. Instead of the fang marks I feared, there was a neat, elongated oval of bloody holes. Then I saw the snake’s teeth, which were long and curved. Up until that point I’d never seen teeth like that on a snake, ever.

It began whipping violently, trying to get loose, but I managed to slip it into my specimen bag and close it tight. It made a real ruckus inside that bag. Its partner, still up in the tree, had climbed all the way to the top and was pretending to be a stick again … but it was watching me.

I was a long way from the boat, so I stopped at a clear stream and rinsed my arm until it stopped bleeding, then began my long trek back. It was noon when I finally reached the boat. My mom applied bandages to my arm and both she and Dad kept asking me if I was sure it wasn’t poisonous. I was sure, because by then I had already looked it up in my field guide.

The snake was called a Racer (Coluber constrictor), and was described as arboreal and its main diet consisted of birds. This explained why it would pretend to be a stick, and also why it had such large curved teeth. These snakes sit in the trees waiting for birds to land, and before the birds know what’s happening they’ve become lunch.

Later I let this snake go back in the area where I’d caught it, hoping it would find its hunting partner. I thought perhaps they were a mated pair. Nowhere in any of the field guides did it mention these snakes staying together in pairs or groups. I may have witnessed a fluke, or some behavior no one had ever seen before.

That was one cool snake, but one I’d advise people to leave alone. If I look really close at my arm, I can still make out the scars from that bite.

From Tales of the Lizard Hunter
By Jerry J. Davis

The funny thing was, we didn’t care much about any of these wonders. We were looking for lizards.

Horny Toads where my favorites, but they were elusive and hard to come by. Spiny Lizards were nearly impossible to catch unless you climbed a telephone pole or a cactus to get to them. There were “whiptails,” which were really fast and had forked tongues like snakes. There was an occasional Chuckwalla or Desert Iguana (those were some big lizards, especially to an 8-year-old) but they were rarely seen, and probably would have bitten off our fingers had we tried to catch them. I never did see one of those poisonous Gila Monsters, though one time I caught a very colorful small lizard and later found it could have been a baby Gila Monster – but I’ll never know.

Every once in a while we would run across the most beautiful lizard I’d ever seen. You’d have to find it by turning over big boards or rocks, where you were more likely to find a nine-inch scorpion. But every once in a while there would be this brightly colored flash and we’d grab – and grab carefully – because the tail would easily come off and that would “ruin” the lizard. This amazing, beautiful little lizard was called the Tucson Banded Gecko, a subspecies of the Western Banded Gecko. We just called them geckos. They were yellow and brown, very soft, had large expressive eyes (the only gecko I know of that has eyelids), and a bulbous, fat tail. My other 8-year-old friends and I all agreed this was a “cool lizard.”

In addition to lizards, we ran across the occasional snake. Out there in the desert, half the snakes we ran into were poisonous, and I’d seen more than my share of sidewinders. Thankfully I had enough sense as a child to just leave them alone. But one time, when we were out riding in the early morning, there was this amazingly large snake stretched all the way across the dirt road. I mean, all the way across. We had an older kid with us (the brother of one of my friends) and he knew what it was. He called it a “bull snake” which is a big cousin of the harmless gopher snake. It looked like a rattler to us, but he picked it up and showed us the tail and the head. There was no rattle, and the head was narrow, proving it wasn’t poisonous. The darn thing was 8 feet long if not longer, and it just let us pick it up without even a struggle. We unanimously decided this snake must go home with us, and the big brother looped it around his neck and we rode back.

Well, his mother freaked out and he couldn’t keep it, so with great ceremony he gave it to me. It was so cool I just couldn’t believe it. Here was a snake that was bigger than I was tall, all looped around my neck and arms like a … well, a snake. It was just too groovy. [Remember, this was the 60's. The words of the day were "groovy," "boss," and "far out."] So I brought it in my house and, not knowing where to keep it, I put it in the guest bath which was the third bathroom Mom wouldn’t let us use because it was “for guests.”

I, uh … neglected to tell anyone about it, though. I knew if I told my mom, she wouldn’t let me keep it, just like the other guy’s mom wouldn’t let him keep it. I figured no one ever used that bathroom so no one would ever find it.

I was wrong. Less than an hour later I heard my mother’s hysterical voice calling out for my dad. “Jiiiiiimmmiiieeeee!” she was shouting, her voice quavering so that I knew she was jumping up and down. “Jimmmmiieeeeeee!!!!”

I hid under my bed and prepared for the worst. I heard my father shout, “Oh my God!” And then, “How in the Hell did that get in there!” Only a few seconds later he called out my name. I still have no idea how they figured it out so fast.

Fortunately my father found it too funny to spank me for, but I had to go let the snake loose out where we’d found it. My big brother drove me out there in his sand buggy. He, too, thought it was pretty funny, but he didn’t tell me that until years later. It was the last snake I brought home until after we moved to California.

One thing I did bring home that the whole family did think was wonderful was a young roadrunner. I saw it down in an arroyo when we were playing with toy cars in the sand, and chased it into a section of the arroyo where it was trapped. It tried to hide behind a big piece of plywood, ducking down and pretending to be a weed. I grabbed it, and it bit me, but I wouldn’t let it go. This was a roadrunner, just like on the cartoon, and I had to show my family. So I carried it all the way home and let it go in the back yard.

My mom had a real way with birds, and it wasn’t more than a day before she had it eating out of her hands. The problem was, it liked bugs. So she was constantly sending me out to catch grasshoppers, and that silly roadrunner would squawk and flap its wings and hold its mouth wide open. My parents would laugh hysterically at it, and feed the thing, and then send me out to catch more bugs.

I quickly got tired of catching bugs for the silly bird, and the bird got hungry one day and decided to try and catch its own bugs. Unfortunately, the bug it was trying to catch was in the swimming pool, and the roadrunner was later found floating face down in the pool, drowned. My mother cried, and then scolded me for bringing it home in the first place.

It wasn’t long after that when a friend and I caught a jack rabbit. We were lifting over boards and rocks looking for geckos, and under one big board was the rabbit. My friend dived across the board, trapping it while I reached under and grabbed fur. It came out kicking, and the claws on its hind feet scratched the hell out of my arm. I quickly dropped it into the pillow case we’d brought along (it was the best thing for keeping lizards in out in the field) and it thrashed around inside but couldn’t get out. My friend and I looked at each other and shouted in pure glee. A jack rabbit! How cool was that? No one we knew had ever caught a jack rabbit before!

I promptly took it home and, once inside the house, called my mom and dad. “Mom! Dad! Look what I caught! Look at this!” And I dumped the jack rabbit out of the bag and onto the carpet. I don’t even think my parents got a chance to see it, it was a brown blur that launched itself toward the couch and dived underneath. Oh, but my dog Pepper saw it, though! Boy did he! The chase was on, all around the house at full speed, right over furniture and across tables and under anything and into every room. They knocked over lamps and crashed into doors and pulled curtains off their rods. My mom was yelling and my dad was laughing, and Pepper was barking. I didn’t know what to do.

Mom took matters into her own hands and opened the front door. The rabbit must have come close to breaking the sound barrier going through that doorway. Pepper tried to follow, but only got to the other side of the street before he stopped, panting like mad, knowing the fun was over. But he turned and looked at me, and I swear I could understand the look on his face. He was saying, “That was great! Can we do that again?”

Not long after that we moved to California, and my days of being a desert rat were over. I’ve been back there since, right in that very neighborhood, but the open desert I had explored as a child is now full of convenience stores, supermarkets, and ever-expanding neighborhoods. I wanted to show it all to my kids, but they just didn’t get it. After thirty years the neighborhood looked like a dump and the desert was full of trash.

And I couldn’t find a single horny toad.