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Ken and I were looking for a geocache near Home Depot last week when we heard a loud rustling noise in the leaves along the sidewalk. Something tumbled onto the pavement, and we turned our flashlights on it:
We see surprisingly few snakes while we're out caching. This was by far the most urban encounter, right along a busy street. The snake ignored us and kept thrashing around – "Is it eating something?" Ken said.
Why, yes, it was. A lizard's tail.
The Western Fence Lizard, like many lizards, has a tail that easily breaks off, so the attacking snake/housecat/etc gets the tail and the rest of the lizard gets the hell out of there. Which is what must've happened right as we arrived.
Still ignoring us, the snake worked the tail around into swallowable position and then proceeded to swallow it.
Once it was done, it skedaddled back into the leaves, very quickly. (But left a tiny bit of tail sticking out, which was funny. If it can't see us, we can't see it, right?)
I initially assumed this was a garter snake, but the more identification stuff I looked at, the more it seemed like the striped version of the California Kingsnake. Which is cool. (They are still pretty common around here, but people seem to find them interesting, so hey.)
We see surprisingly few snakes while we're out caching. This was by far the most urban encounter, right along a busy street. The snake ignored us and kept thrashing around – "Is it eating something?" Ken said.
The Western Fence Lizard, like many lizards, has a tail that easily breaks off, so the attacking snake/housecat/etc gets the tail and the rest of the lizard gets the hell out of there. Which is what must've happened right as we arrived.
Once it was done, it skedaddled back into the leaves, very quickly. (But left a tiny bit of tail sticking out, which was funny. If it can't see us, we can't see it, right?)
I initially assumed this was a garter snake, but the more identification stuff I looked at, the more it seemed like the striped version of the California Kingsnake. Which is cool. (They are still pretty common around here, but people seem to find them interesting, so hey.)
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I used to have a pet garter snake and have witnessed a lot of snake noms but by far the most amazing/traumatising was the time we had (unbeknownst to me until the shit hit the fan) a nest of baby rabbits in our raised bed garden in Maryland and then a pretty large black ratsnake found its way in there and proceeded to pick off and devour every single one of them in front of my very eyes.
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I love snakes. I've got boa...but the tiny ones you encounter in the wild are awesome in a whole nother way.