- A Rattlesnake at our house

A Rattlesnake at our house

Written by Mike Noel

Wednesday, 13 April 2005

Westly: What are the three dangers of the fire swamp? The fire spurts, no problem, threre's a noise preceeding each one so we can watch out for that; the lightning sand, you were able to find out about that without fair warning so we can watch out for that too.
Buttercup: But Westly, what about the R.O.U.S's?
Westly: Rodents of unusual size? I don't think they exist.

And in my case, "Poisonous rattlesnakes? I don't think they exist". Clearly I was kidding but actually I had not seen any rattlesnakes since moving to Arizona. Not even on any of my hikes in the desert. Well last weekend was my opportunity to see one up close.
Saturday morning my brother-in-law and I were doing some landscaping at my house. It only took an hour to do what we needed to do. As we were cleaning things up I spotted something in my neighbors driveway. At first I thought that one of my kids left a plastic snake on her driveway last night when we were all out playing. But then it moved and it was kinda big for a play snake.

Nope, it wasn't play. It was a real Diamondback Rattlesnake. The snake was about 3 feet long. As we watched it it crawled under my neighbor's gate and into her backyard. We watched it over the fence from there. It had 7 rattles and 4 black rings on its tail. Supposedly you can tell the age of the snake using those features. I don't know how to tell.

At that point we weren't quite sure what to do. I knew that I didn't want a poisonous snake living next door to me and my kids. After making a few phone calls we found a volunteer organization (http://www.azreptiles.com/) that did snake removal.

We spent most of the day watching the snake so that when the snake collector came he could find it. Later in the afternoon he came by and managed to capture it. The snake wasn't happy with being captured but I suppose it was better than being killed. The guy was going to take the snake out into the desert and release it there.

Apparently there are hundreds, or even thousands, of rattlesnakes in the hills around our house here. This time of year is when they start to come out of hibernation (it's not really called hibernation for snakes but it's the same sort of thing). They are fairly intelligent as far as reptiles go and are not interested in dealing with humans. It will take a few years for the snakes to migrate out of the area.

So now I have to agree that snakes really do exist.