Note the raised tail as he sends me a warning!
When I was in college at N. AZ Univ. I knew a guy who was
studying herpetology which includes the study of snakes. He had snakes in aquariums in his dorm room
including rattle snakes believe it or not.
Since I was a rock climber and hiker sharing the same domain as rattlers
I was kind of interested in their behavior.
I found out one thing interesting was that many snakes, not just
rattlers, vibrate their tails when threatened.
Rattles just happen to have rattles.
And the sound they make, which I have heard a number of times in the
wild as well, is more a buzz than a
rattle. Hear it once and you won’t soon
forget it if you hang out where rattlers call home.
My friend invited me to come to his dorm room when he fed the
rattlers. So I took him up on it. It was kinda gut wrenching what happened
next.
He had one diamond back rattler about 2 feet long in a glass
enclosure. He picked up a small mouse by
the tail, and as it wiggled he dropped
it in the glass box. I felt so terrible
for that poor little mouse who knew immediately he had just been sentenced to death. The snake didn’t move an inch. The mouse was in sheer terror scrambling
around the square glass box desperately looking for place to hide. There was none. The mouse was in such terror he even ran
right over the snake’s head and body several times. The snake still didn’t move. He knew he didn’t have to. In the wild this would have been a hunt, the mouse might have had a chance and a place ti hide, but
here it was just a cold calculated murder.
The rattler just sat there for a long time, and the mouse
calmed down a little. Then it
started. The rattler began to ever so very
slowly coil. No rush no hurry but deadly
committed. He sat in the coil for a
while and at point where the mouse hesitated for split second FLASH WHAM!!!! Faster than lightening or faster than you
could real even see the rattler struck the mouse broadside.
The rattler didn’t get excited after injecting the mouse
with its deadly venom. It was a cold deadly
calculated kill. No fuss no muss…game
over! The snake then slowly relaxed and
went to a corner and watched. The mouse had jumped at the strike but then sat
numb. He scrambled around a bit but
slowly the snake’s hemotoxin, which is a
toxin that attacks the blood, slowly did
its job and took over the mouse’s body
until after a few convulsions it finally collapsed.
Then very slowly and
deliberately the snake slid silently over to the mouse and devoured it whole!
That was not a smooth process. The snake
had to sort of gulp the mouse’s body down a little at a time. He would gulp in then rest, then gulp in again with its
muscles, and finally the mouse disappeared and became a lump in the rattlers
body.
Now if you have been involved with wind developers in Cape
Vincent…does this story of the rattler and mouse remind you of anything? It should, since the lease holders and the politicians just
fed our community to BP then closed the lid with Article X. And BP just sits there and slowly coils waiting
for the exact right opportunity for the
deadly calculated kill as we wiggle and squirm!
Just like the mouse, our community got plucked up by the
tail and as we wiggled and squirmed we got dropped into the glass box with the
rattler and then the lid was tightly closed.
And the snake is asking us to not be unreasonable as he
coils for the deadly kill.
And the really scary part in this story is …. far too many of
us are willing to agree!!!!!!
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