Our Rattlesnake Adventures part 1 of 4

This is rattlesnake country.  Something like over 35 different types.  And like I posted earlier, they don’t all rattle. 

I don’t like snakes, of any sort, though I can recognize that they are beautiful & fascinating in their own way.  Growing up near the coast in BC we haven’t had to deal with any poisonous reptiles so this is all new to us.

We’ve started spotting them now, the days are warming up and they are out of their dens, too near our camp for comfort.  The boys are the ones who typically spot them on the trail that starts basically at our doorstep.  This one

was in front of Anders as he came back from the banos.  Same place as other sightings; maybe its the same one, or a different one, we aren’t sure.  Everette took a shovel to it the other day and since then we haven’t seen one near our camp.

It was a Western Diamondback, also known as Coon Tail because of its distinctive black stripes that come right before the rattles.

We found the whole thing amazing.  (Well, not the killing part, although we are glad that nobody got hurt and that potentially we got rid of the frequenting snake.)  Once the head was cut off, the body continued to writhe for more than an hour!  Everette buried the head which supposedly can still bite for hours afterwards.  All kinds of people took turns touching and holding it.  A bit unnerving when it starts to curl up towards your hands.

Gaelyn

We showed Frank/Gisele and Tom/Meralyn who were having Happy Hour, and they were all fascinated.  Frank admitted to being jealous of Everette killing a rattler before he ever has, especially since Frank’s been coming to Mexico for near a decade.  This is our first time.  But it certainly wasn’t a highlight for Everette.  He was actually disturbed from the whole thing.  He felt he wanted to make our camp a safer place, and yet we are the ones imposing on the snakes environment.  It’s not like its viciously coming after us.  Was killing it the right thing?  Virtually all our neighbours said they would have done the same thing near camp.  But ‘majority’ doesn’t make it right.

 

 

 

 

 

VIEW FROM OUR KITCHEN:

Raindrops, don’t amount to much