Ever notice how some animals have a good energy about them, others not so good?
Dogs = good.
Snakes = bad.
The other day, our Evangelical Christian neighbors were out walking their dogs.
“Do you ever find any ssserpentsss in your field?” the woman asked.
The way Jim tells it, she hissed the word serpents. “As if she couldn’t stand the thought of snakes,” he says, and then he wiggles his shoulders in mock shudder.
Snakes can be scary. Especially poisonous snakes.
But Baby… well, Baby is a baby. Not in terms of her age, just her disposition.
She is, we’re told, old for a bullsnake. Almost 30.
The story goes: the previous owner of the place was driving down a dirt road on Indian land near the Arizona – New Mexico border. A baby snake went slithering across the road; the jeep barely missed it. The guy jumped out, caught the snake, and brought it home in a coffee can.
He built a six-foot-long, two-level cage in an enclosed potting shed next to the house. One whole wall of the cage is a south-facing window.
The day we did our walk-through inspection, the guy asked us if we’d like to keep her. We had dogs, chickens, ducks, and turkeys. Why not a snake?
Indeed. Why not a snake?
She’s about eight feet long. Maybe longer. She’s alert, especially when she’s hungry. She’ll come up to where you’re standing and see what you have for her. Or maybe she thinks you’re the food.
Jim feeds her a rat, a big one, every three to four weeks. She usually eats it in a matter of minutes. I can’t watch. Once the rat screamed.
I’m not planning to introduce Baby to our neighbor. Unless, of course, the neighbor comes knocking on our door bearing a Bible. In which case, I might take her out to the potting shed.
I met Baby…Nice sssserpent!
My first year here in Venezuela I was freaked about all sorts of things (still am, but I deal with it). I used to go fishing with guys I worked with. We’d go to a remote reservoir some 3 hours from where we lived and worked. We fished from the bank since we didn’t have a boat. The weeds were waste high. I was concerned alittle about snakes and “killer bees”. We were working our way back to the Trooper casting about into different areas when my lure, a $3.00 Rapala, wrapped around a snag in the water. My buddies told me to go get it. I was willing to leave it but there was a matter of machismo involved, so I took off my shirt and waded into the dark, muddy water; prime anaconda habitat. I hear they’ll wrap themselves around tree stumps in shallow water waiting for their favorite prey the chirguiti (forget the US word for this animal, but its world’s largest rodent). I was hoping I wasn’t to become prey. I quickly retrieved my lure and hurried out of the water before an anaconda could grab me.
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Egads. Don’t be so macho next time, eh? That’s pretty scary.
Can an anaconda really squeeze an adult man to death?
Now, see, where’s the first place we go with this? Scary man-squeezing serpent stories 8) .
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I won’t let me wife see these photos. She is somewhat neurotic regarding snakes. They are scary, but not as scary as naked clowns.
And, you have been tagged.
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Yay! Baby pictures! Does this mean you got the free camera?
Your neighbor actually used the word “serpents”? No one uses that word without either “sea” in front of it or the devil behind it. You need a “Snake Charmer” shirt to wear around town.
And just for reference, reticulated pythons have been known to occasionally ingest an entire adult human. That said, I don’t think you have to worry about being Baby’s lunch.
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Yes, she did, and I’m sure she spelled it right, too ; – ). (I went back and spelled mine right.)
Jim got Baby a rat today; Baby had been alert, seemed hungry. So far the rat and the snake are co-existing. So, right now, even the rat doesn’t seem to have to worry about being Baby’s lunch.
stevo, naked clowns are worse than anything except sharks, perhaps. I might have to doodle one.
And thanks for the tag. We’re one behind, so let’s hope we can get to this one before too much time goes by.
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BTW, sam, I didn’t get the free camera, but I did splurge on a cheapo replacement for the one in the pond.
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That series of photos shows exactly what a Baby she is. Awwww…
The Jungle Book had the snake in it that kept saying, “trusssst meee” with the hissy sound. Whenever I feel compelled to ask my husband to go along with my line of thinking, I say, “trussssst meee…”
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See, I like snakes for the most part. Not so much poisonous ones, but I respect their right to exist. I wouldn’t mind having a pet snake, but I’m certain that C would never go for it.
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She’s lovely. I would never be able to handle the rat-feeding. I prefer to believe that nature is always friendly and cheerful, and probably vegetarian. Naive, I am. 🙂
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I can’t handle the rat-feeding either. Jim has to.
Yet, there is this side of me that tries to watch… I’m thinking out loud here. I actually am intrigued by nature this way, but then it becomes torture. And that I just can’t handle.
teaspoon, up until this year, when we inherited Baby, I never thought I would or could have a snake. Trusssst meeeee… they’re really just like dogsssss….
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I can’t wait to see that drawing of the naked clown shark.
😉 H
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Sorry. I’m not a big fan of snakes… 😮
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Hmm, a naked clown shark. Like a giant brother to a naked clown fish. I’ll have to cogitate on that one.
LB, no apologies necessary. It seems that, just like there are big-dog people and small-dog people, cat people and not-cat people, etc., there are snake people and not-snake people. You’re a not-snake people. I’m a reformed not-snake people. I can relate to not big fan of snakes.
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Great photos of Baby, ybonesy. I had the pleasure of actually meeting her when I visited with you in July. She was pretty calm, yet alert. I can’t believe she’s 30 years old.
The first time I ever petted a snake was at the Minnesota Zoo. They had a show and tell and I couldn’t resist. The snake’s skin was almost velvety and so soft. (I thought it was going to be rubbery or slimy, so that was a pleasant surprise.)
I have a mild fear of poisonous snakes from growing up in the South where we had water moccasins swimming with us in the lakes. You kind of got used to seeing them and learned to not disturb them. Same way with the black widow spiders. There are a lot of critters down there!
Glad you got a new camera. I like the detail of Baby’s skin and the composition with the wire and wood of the cage in the last one.
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I like snakes, but only if there is a good distance between us. There are plenty of snakes on our property (I’m sure more than I’m aware of), and I enjoy watching them on those first warm, sunny days of spring when they sit on a rock or the concrete on the front porch and sun themselves.
I like your photos of Baby. The last one has a lot of texture to it.
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Thanks, QM and Robin. An especially great compliment on the photos coming from each of you!!
QM, Jim and I have a hard time believing she is 30ish, even though that’s what the previous owner said. I think we saw in the research we did on bullsnakes, after we inherited her, that bullsnakes — even in captivity — only live up to about 20 years. Well, she might be an exceptionally healthy and long-living snake, I suppose. She is awfully long and big.
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I like the feel of snakes. Like QM said, they are silky and smooth, not like you would think they feel.
As for snakes in the wild, I am always on the look out for them when hiking in the woods or looking for geocaches in the rocks but have only seen one poisonous one in the wild and it could have cared less that three people were taking the opportunity to make it a photo shoot of the Timber Rattler (in the black phase).
I don’t think that I would have any problem feeding baby because that is how most of nature exists. It’s a snake eat rat world out there and even thought I eat meat I think that in nature the struggle between eating or being eaten is a much nobler thing that how we have industrialized the production of the meat we eat.
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Yes, intellectually I know that, but it’s the act and the fear (of the rat) and pain involved that I just have to get over each time, else I want to rescue the rat.
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This discussion reminded me of Darwin (LINK). And then I was looking at him in Wiki and saw a link to Harriet, the Galápagos tortoise (LINK), who supposedly belonged to Darwin. But then they weren’t sure because did Darwin really go to the original island that Harriet came from?
Then I started thinking that Darwin was a pretty interesting character and created a lot of controversy just following his heart. And then I was thinking of Baby, your snake, and if she really was 30 years old. But if Harriet lived to be 175 years old, then isn’t it entirely possible that such a close reptilian relation as Baby could also live way beyond her years?
Then lastly, I thought of that song, I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes by Jim Stafford (LINK).
The mind is a strange interconnected thing. 8)
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I love snakes, and would enjoy having one as a pet, I think. I wouldn’t be able to watch the feeding, though.
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yb,
you seem to have this way of being able to tap into the collective unconscious. Snake is such an archetypal motif. I meet a lot more in dreams than I ever have in waking. I once visited with some people in L.A. who had a large snake wandering around the house. (possibly a more colourful verb than wandering is required here?). They assured us in that slightly aggressive way people sometimes have that the snake was no problem. Be cool about this snake, Bud, or I could get very uncool about you!
Not one of my more favourite recollections!
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I didn’t know rats could scream. I just saw and loved the movie Ratatoille. The rats were so cute. One of my sons had a pet white rat, Slinky, in his preschool class who gently climbed all over the kids. The thought of a rat screaming. Boo-hoo. I have always had a deep fear of snakes. As a child, stayed indoors for days after spying one. Once the rat screamed. That’s like a friend once claiming (here in New England) she heard a lobster scream as it was lowered into boiling water….
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I have an extra-ordinary fear of snakes. When I lived in Arizona, I worked on top of a mountain as a amethyst miner (okay, when I was 23 or so and I am 61 now, so it’s THAT long ago). Still, we lived with timber rattlesnakes. They did not fit the “they are more afraid of you than you are of them” mode of thinking. Highly aggressive, they’d be on the trail and come at you rather than slither away.
One time in the mine, my partner told me to back out – we were in a tight space crawling toward a big cache of crystals. I didn’t waste any time – when we got out, he said there were two snakes right in front of him. The vision of being on your belly in a tight space in the dark and coming upon two sleeping timber rattlesnakes was enough to keep me awake nights.
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Janice, those are some scary snakes you write about. If I encountered a snake that aggressive, I’d be running the other way, too. I’m also intrigued by the idea of being an amethyst miner on a mountain top. I bet there was a big market for those at one time. Are they all found underground like that?
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I don’t have a fear of snakes, although rattlers are a different story. I do have a fear of caves and tunnels. So coming across two rattlesnakes down a mineshaft is about one of more scary things I can think of.
Bummer…two snakes blocking you from a cache of crystals — that’s like something out of Indiana Jones. Maybe not quite so dramatic, but plenty still.
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[…] So far my most plausible idea is to use the letters as material — quotable quotes — for red Ravine. You know, for those days when I have nothing more interesting to post; no salient information for writers or artists, not even some fascinating tidbit about the turkeys or Baby. […]
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[…] childhood dream. So it is with some sense of bafflement that I look before me and see that, besides the bullsnake we inherited, our pets consist of two dogs and six turkeys. Well, and one duck. (OK, we also have a horse, but […]
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[…] -related to posts: haiku (one-a-day), Meet Baby! […]
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I have to tell you, some people think that you can’t get emotional over a reptile. There perhaps not all cute and fuzzy like a cat or dog but a couple of months ago my cat killed a snake that I had had for just under a year, I was quite down for a good while. it was only a garter snake but I enjored it and felt safe vis a vis my young son and the snake (spitz we called him). So know i;m debating wether or not to get a new one. My buddy runs a little reptile cage shop and keeps pushing me to get a bigger animal. Not sure yet.
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I would feel sad over losing a snake. I get sad when I see one occasionally dead on the road, run over. Garters are striking (lookwise). We found a lot of babies this spring, got a terrarium to keep one that we unearthed when it was still too cold to let it go. It buried under shavings, and when it got warm enough we let it go. One snake is enough for us.
She had her first rat of the year this past week, btw. I get a little emotional over those feedings ; – ).
Thanks for stopping by, Jim.
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[…] -Related to posts Who Said Snakes Aren’t Cute?, snake awake haiku, and Meet Baby! […]
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[…] other morning Baby the Bullsnake was lying in her empty water dish, breathing hard as if she were panting. (Do snakes pant?) […]
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