Yesterday morning, I spotted this handsome lark sparrow foraging on the ground near a road. Merlin helped me identify it by its song (and that of others nearby), and isn’t it a lovely little bird! I particularly love this description from Cornell’s All About Birds website: “This large sparrow may be brown, but its harlequin facial pattern and white tail spots make it a standout among sparrows. Males sing a melodious jumble of churrs, buzzes, and trills reminiscent of an Old World lark.” I’m not sure what an “Old World lark” sounds like, but I did enjoy listening to the variety of trills from a variety of birds!
I also saw these lovelies swooping and soaring and preening on a fence wire:
I wish I’d caught the “sidle closer” steps as the bird on the right moved closer to its friend. (I *think* these are both males, but I’d love to be corrected?)
All About Birds says this about them: “You can find the adaptable Barn Swallow feeding in open habitats from fields, parks, and roadway edges to marshes, meadows, ponds, and coastal waters. Their nests are often easy to spot under the eaves or inside of sheds, barns, bridges and other structures.”
They use mud to build their nests, and we’re a bit in short supply of mud at the moment. Though Disappointment Creek wasn’t too far away as the sparrow dives, so hopefully that mud is close (enough) at hand (err, wing).
A different pair, taken from the same place just a bit farther along on the same fence wire.
Aren’t they magnificent? Cornell says they’re the most abundant and widely distributed swallow species in the world, but that doesn’t stop them from being simply stunning little birds.
A couple of interesting facts (among a few), also from All About Birds:
Although the killing of egrets is often cited for inspiring the U.S. conservation movement, it was the millinery (hat-making) trade’s impact on Barn Swallows that prompted naturalist George Bird Grinnell’s 1886 Forest & Stream editorial decrying the waste of bird life. His essay led to the founding of the first Audubon Society.
According to legend, the Barn Swallow got its forked tail because it stole fire from the gods to bring to people. An angry deity hurled a firebrand at the swallow, singeing away its middle tail feathers.
What do they eat? “Barn Swallows feed on the wing, snagging insects from just above the ground or water to heights of 100 feet or more.” With gnat season upon us, feed, swallows, feed on those wings! 🙂
Big day in Spring Creek Basin yesterday, and I want to give a big shout-out to everyone who had a hand in the rescue of a young visitor from the Midwest.
The visitor had a Garmin In-Reach communication device and with that, was able to reach her mother, who contacted Tres Rios Field Office, who got the message to one of my awesome BLM folks, Ryan Schroeder, who was able to reach me. She also reached out to the fine folks at Colorado 4×4 Rescue and Recovery, who have assisted us previously with another stuck vehicle. San Miguel Sheriff’s Office personnel and BLM law-enforcement rangers also were notified and aware of the situation.
It’s worth noting that cell service in the basin, no matter what service you have (and if you don’t have AT&T, you’re pretty well toast), is spotty, and there’s nothing in the area where she got stuck.
Huge, huge thanks to neighbor Tyrell, who jumped into action with his daughter, Makena, and their big tractor to motor deep into Spring Creek Basin on rough roads where lesser vehicles might fear to roll (for good reason, really :)) to pull out the visitor’s vehicle and get her safely on the return path out of the basin.
Another note, and this is not a criticism of the visitor herself, who had never been to Spring Creek Basin: Please be aware of and HEED the “no motor vehicles” signs. Not only are those in place to protect the very fragile and incredibly drought-stressed soil and vegetation the mustangs depend on to survive, they’re placed where they are to protect humans as well. She missed the sign while following heavy tire tracks from other visitors – DIRECTLY PAST A SIGN. Those folks are going around an erosion-caused washout across the road, and while I understand the desire to explore farther, that illegal bypass route not only has destroyed the vegetation in that area, it led directly to someone getting her vehicle stuck miles and miles from help. If she hadn’t had her communication device, she would have had a LONG walk out to the main road, and as few people pass through Disappointment Valley on any given day, and she didn’t have cell service, help might have been a long time coming. I was planning a visit to the basin yesterday evening, but her vehicle wasn’t visible from the road, and *I* don’t pass that initial washout and sign, which I helped our BLM guys place last fall! I’d never have found her if I wasn’t actively looking for her.
That is NOT ground to be driven over! At least one person apparently heeded the sign and turned around. The water catchment is directly behind me from this image, and someone had literally driven directly over branches that I’ve dragged down the hill, along with old, dead tree trunks, and placed all along the other side of the road (I’m actually standing on the road, and the washout is directly to the right) to try to keep people from driving on THAT fragile soil and vegetation just because they’re too lazy to get out of the buggy or truck to walk down and look at the catchment system closer.
The sign and blockade had mostly worked. … Those tracks from before (see the above link to last November’s sign-posting) had semi-healed … until this recent spate of destruction. We shouldn’t have to pepper the basin with signs asking people to respect the land and wildlife. (And I haven’t even posted about all the wanton, deliberate destruction I’ve seen in other places this year, last year, every year, from multiple “poor apple” visitors. It makes me mad and sad in equal measure every time I see it.)
So two parts to this post:
BIG THANKS to all the people who came together to get this visitor and her vehicle safely out of Spring Creek Basin! You are all so very appreciated!
And please, *please*, consider the mustangs and other wildlife when you visit Spring Creek Basin. Your momentary “fun” has very real and lasting negative impacts. Please visit with respect.
We want you to enjoy the scenery and mustangs of Spring Creek Basin, and we want you to make it home … from our home.
Why am I showing you all this very-far-away image of a pronghorn doe in the middle of a vast, open, empty stretch of land in Spring Creek Basin – and again, from a very great distance?
Because it’s not empty.
There’s mama pronghorn, of course. I saw her as I arrived at my usual spot from which I scan as much of the basin as I can for mustangs and other interesting things.
What you *can’t* see is her baby, curled tightly up into the edge of one of the sagebrush or saltbushes you see dotting the landscape. *I* can’t see it, even zoomed in, and then I forgot exactly which one it curled up against. Nature’s camouflage, indeed!
🙂
I saw it only briefly, through the binoculars, when she was with it, and it folded those impossibly long legs, dropped and went into hiding right before my glued-to-the-glass eyeballs – and then I forgot which bush it was near as I watched mama start to walk away, clearly worried about the choice between staying with her baby and my presence on a not-far-enough-away-for-comfort hill.
*Note: Mama pronghorns, like deer and elk – and domestic bovines – tuck their very-new babies into hiding, and the babies’ inborn instinct is to stay there, scentless, until mama returns. Mustangs do NOT perform this behavior, keeping their babies with them always, and the entire band provides protection to any outside threat.
While scanning the basin for mustangs, I then noticed a group of five pronghorns much closer below me. I’d walked away a little distance to look at them without my camera (never leave your camera behind), so what follows are some cellphone pix after they noticed me and made a big circle away and then up and around me to where they were basically above mama prongs. (I think I use my cell phone these days for more than actually making calls; how crazy!)
Three of the five; see them? Sort of center, light dots. Across the bottom/foreground is the berm of the road, and in the FAR back distance (near the very top of the pic, a bit to the right of center), those white dots are mustangs.
The other two of the five, following the first three. What a great view of Spring Creek Basin, eh? Spring Creek arroyo is the dark line in the semi-middle of the pic, on its way to Spring Creek canyon, where all the water gathered in Spring Creek Basin runs across part of Disappointment Valley to join Disappointment Creek, which eventually joins the Dolores River on its way to the Colorado River.
A top-down view of the aforementioned Spring Creek canyon – that’s the south-facing north wall of the canyon, spread-eagled like a, well, eagle’s wings. 🙂 See the pronghorns? All five are in this pic. You bet I was kicking myself for having walked away from my camera, but I didn’t expect them to give me such a great view! In the first two pix, I was looking down to the eastish and northeastish; now I’m looking fairly northish.
Now I’m looking westish/southwestish up the hill “behind” me (from the direction I was facing when I first saw them downhill from me). From that vantage point, they stopped, and I was able to regain my big gun (I never left the immediate area where I’d stopped to glass the basin), and they graciously waited while I snapped off some pix. They could see the mama below – and she could see them – from this point. The road is down below them to the left.
Note that the doe immediately in front of the buck looks suspiciously round in the belly. 🙂 Soon-to-be more new life!
When they all went out of sight down the hill, I decided that they didn’t need any continuing paparazzi, and I didn’t need to visit farther into the basin that day, and I headed back out. Good luck, little prongs; I hope to see you running soon like the fastest land mammal in North America that you were born to be!
What follows is a random selection of cellphone pix from a couple of evenings ago in wild, woolly and very windy Spring Creek Basin.
First sego lily of the season! That I’ve seen, anyway. It was SO windy, the flower was whipping around like crazy, so I tried to hold it still for my phone. It’s always a bit of a crap shoot to try to take pix of small things with my phone because I can’t see at all whether the *thing* is in focus or whether it’s the background.
Case in point: I took several pix of this beauty, within a couple of feet of the first one, and only the last one was in focus (that could have been the wind). I adore these lilies – in the desert! These seemed smaller than usual, but I’m glad to see them.
While the pix of the sego lilies seem to suggest that it was sunny, mostly we had these crazy, wildly dramatic clouds looming over the basin. These are mammatus clouds. Looking eastish-northeastish.
Google AI says:
Mammatus clouds are distinct, pouch-like cloud protrusions that hang downward from the base of a larger cloud, usually a towering cumulonimbus. Named after the Latin word for “udder” or “breast”, these stunning formations are fascinating for their unique shape and the rare meteorological process that creates them.
How They Form
Unlike most clouds, which are created by rising air (updrafts), mammatus clouds are formed by sinking air (downdrafts). [1]
The Process: Pockets of cold, dense air saturated with heavy ice crystals and precipitation sink downward from the parent cloud (usually the “anvil” of a thunderstorm).
The Shape: As these dense, cool pockets of air descend into warmer, drier air beneath the cloud, the ice and water begin to evaporate. This evaporation cools the air even more, causing the pockets to sink further, creating the characteristic rounded, bubble-like pouches. [1, 2, 3]
What They Indicate
While their ominous, alien-like appearance might make them look like the beginning of a severe storm or tornado, mammatus clouds are generally a sign that the worst part of the storm has already passed or is off in the distance.
Severe Weather Link: They are most commonly spotted in the vicinity of strong thunderstorms. If you spot them during the summer months, it usually means there are powerful storm cells nearby.
Safe or Not: Mammatus clouds themselves do not produce severe weather and are not dangerous to anyone on the ground. However, pilots are warned to avoid them because the sinking air can cause intense turbulence.
Key Characteristics
Composition: Because they hang high in the atmosphere, they are primarily composed of ice crystals rather than liquid water droplets.
Lifespan: They are relatively short-lived, typically appearing and dissipating within 10 to 30 minutes.
The Best Time to See Them: They are particularly striking at sunset or sunrise, when the low angle of the sun illuminates the underside of the pouches, turning them brilliant shades of gold, orange, pink, or deep blue.
In our case, they appeared around three hours before sunset, so we didn’t get the color, but they’re still pretty amazing to see, even if they also did NOT bring us any rain.
This was taken at about the same time, now looking eastish to southeastish. And quite a bit later, it looked REALLY rainy out beyond our local horizon. So hopefully somebody somewhere got some wet stuff.
Have to have a pony walking the skyline. 🙂 He was heading to the Spring Creek arroyo (down to the left), and pretty soon, his band followed. Looked like it was raining somewhere out in that direction, too (westish-southwestish).
And at the very end of the day (an hour or more later than the last pic), a pretty glorious and somewhat unexpected (and *very* brief) shot of sunset brilliance from the west end of the basin looking westish-northwestish. There were horses immediately behind me, but they were already in the shade of the hill, and that side was already fairly darkrainydusty (? did I mention the howling wind?).
Even under the “worst” conditions, there’s always such beauty. 🙂
This little chubster was singing his heart out on top of a greasewood the other day when I was wandering along with a band of mustangs. I found out later that he’s a rock wren.
I know I just wrote on a previous post that I’m not an app person, but if you like birds and you don’t have the free Merlin bird-identification app on your phone, get it! I’ve had it for a while, but I’ve been slow to adopt some of the features – like recording bird songs in the area and seeing what Merlin says I’m listening to. I’ve done that when I can hear birds but not see them, and that’s how I first heard/identified rock wrens, when I was above the (dry) Spring Creek arroyo (in Spring Creek Basin) a couple of weeks ago. This is not an ad for Merlin, but I do use it a fair bit, and it’s one that I find super useful, so I thought I’d share (also, it’s specifically the only way I know what that little bird IS!).
For the pic above, I uploaded that to my app, and it gave me the ID, just like that. 🙂 Little brother was LOUD and enthusiastic. Apparently, this is part of their breeding grounds, so no wonder he was singing his heart out!
You all (must by now) know that I love photographing the (almost) full moon rising over Spring Creek Basin. This post assumes that you all at least like seeing it, too, because it was AWE*MAAAAAAAAAAAAZING Thursday night (the night before actual fullness), and I have some pix of its awesomeness to share.
How. Insanely. Cool. Is. THAT??????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is what Google AI has to say about the May “Flower Moon” (technically, these pix were taken Thursday, April 30, the night when sunset and moonrise *almost* very nearly match (maybe they do in some places with less topography difference?)):
In May 2026, there are two full moons, known as a “Blue Moon” scenario. The first, the Full Flower Moon, peaks on Friday, May 1, at 1:23 P.M. EDT. The second, a Blue Moon (and Micromoon), occurs on Sunday, May 31, at 4:45 A.M. EDT.
Key Details for May 2026 Full Moons:
May 1 – Full Flower Moon: Named for the abundance of flowers in spring. It is also known as the Hare Moon, Corn Planting Moon, or Milk Moon. It represents renewal and growth.
May 31 – Blue Moon: This is the second full moon in a single calendar month.
Viewing: According to EarthSky, the moon will appear full both on the morning of May 1 and in the evening of May 1.
Cultural Significance: In Buddhism, this time commemorates the birth, enlightenment, and passing of the Buddha. Pagans often associate it with fire rituals and prosperity.
These moons are ideal times for observing, as the Flower Moon marks the height of spring blooming in the Northern Hemisphere.
How cool to have TWO full moons in the month of May!
I am not an app person. And yet, I have *two* apps on my phone that I use to try to plan (guess) where the moon will rise from any given location at any given phase: PhotoPills and Sun Surveyor. Also, I am NOT a mathematician, an astronomer, a physicist or a PhD candidate in any known subject involving any of the aforementioned subjects. I’ve poked around with both apps, watched YouTube videos and seen numerous fabulous shots where the users claim to have pinpointed the exact moonrise/set and/or sunrise/set using one of these apps or any other. Mostly, I like to use the “live view” or “augmented reality” views. … And still, I find them frustratingly INaccurate. That said, they get me semi, sorta, kinda close? And that counts for a lot.
And inevitably, I’m in the wrong location and have to scramble around like the proverbial headless chicken to get into *actual* position while the moon goes from barely visible above the horizon to fully in the sky in about 2.7 seconds. (The deets from my images don’t quite bear that out, but seriously, it’s just about as fast as a pronghorn racing across the range.) The out-of-focus yellow in the near foreground of this pic is a cluster of prince’s plume blooms. I like it, but I think that if you don’t know what it is, it’s sort of random? And notice how the moon is balanced slightly differently on the top of Temple Butte; moving just a little bit back and forth (as I searched for a nice cluster to place in the foreground) can make a big difference – hence my running around like a headless chicken as it was rising.
All week, I’d been mostly skunked in my planning forays by cloud cover – either across most of the sky or JUST along the eastern horizon beyond Temple Butte and McKenna Peak. (And no, those clouds did NOT produce rain over us.) Even an hour before moonrise Thursday, I’d have bet money that I’d be skunked again. Miraculously (pretty sure it was an actual miracle), the clouds cleared – just there! – in time for moonrise. Above, you can see the remnants of clouds, lit up by the nearly-same-time sunset.
The cloudlight didn’t last long.
When the sunlight was nearly gone, Corazon’s band graciously wandered into the frame … and even with a prince’s plume bunch to boot. 🙂
“I love it when a plan comes together.” 🙂 (Thanks to the A-Team’s Col. “Hannibal” Smith!)
Note the slight rainbow at far right, looking pretty much straight southeast up-valley Disappointment. Familiar icons at far left make up Spring Creek Basin’s eastern horizon.
If it looks wet, it was. Give or take (thanks for the *give*, Mz Nature!), Disappointment Valley got half an inch of rain. The great thing was that it kept coming. … The sunshine would break through … then another wave of rain would pass through … then the sunshine would break through … then another wave would pass through.
Tuesday was a wild and crazy day … and that was just the weather. It was ultimately a successful day, though at least one part left me shaking my head at, well, how life unfolds. And it was a reminder that sometimes the smallest things, and the simplest things, are the most enjoyable of all.
From yesterday’s post, are you wondering what graupel looks like? (Thanks, Valerie, for your comment that led to this post!)
What? I hear you asking. That looks like snow or rain, you’re saying (zoom in to see the streaks). Look on the ground in the lower right corner. I was backed in under a (dead) tree to sit out one wave of it (it wasn’t very hard, and it didn’t last long) at that little side “road” to Disappointment Road, which is across the whole pic. See the little white “balls”?
AI says this: “Graupel, or soft hail, forms when supercooled water droplets freeze onto falling snowflakes, creating soft, small white pellets (2-5 mm) that resemble Dippin’ Dots or Styrofoam. These fragile, slushy particles are often called snow pellets and, unlike hard hail, crumble easily. They occur during wintry mix scenarios, causing sudden, slick conditions, and are identified in aviation reports as ‘GS’.”
I liked this part: Types of Graupel While commonly called graupel, it is sometimes referred to as:
Matsaaruti: A term used in the Nunavik region of Canada to describe wet, soft snow pellets.
Another pic from the same location as the first pic, looking pretty much straight north at what I call west-of-favorite hill (because it’s, you know, west of what I call favorite hill, which I so-named because once upon a very long time ago, “the pintos” really favored that hill and could very often be found atop it).
Also from the same spot, looking eastish again as the graupel wave recedes, driven by a strong out-of-the-south wind (I lost track, but at least three, maybe four went over us Tuesday morning). You can see Brumley Point very distinctly, submarine ridge and McKenna Peak to the left it it, and you can’t quite make out Temple Butte. If you slide back up to the first pic, Temple Butte is juuuuuust barely visible at far left, just under the power lines. And yes, the sunshine IS coming back out over the rest of us while the wave pushes north to the east.
With Artemis II and its remarkable human beings on board, their mission, their accomplishments, the images they sent back, from space looking home, in mind … and realizing the absolute tiny-ness of this one itty-bitty part of our great, wide, wild, wonderful, big blue marble … ain’t Earth gorgeous? Now you can see Temple Butte’s promontory emerging from behind Brumley Point (see the graupel/moisture evidence shining below its rimrocks?) and submarine ridge and McKenna Peak. And though you can’t see them in this pic, there were two groups of mustangs out there. Across the road and on the other side of that fence IS Spring Creek Basin.
Anybody know what this prickly little caterpillar is called? I’m not sure of the plant it’s on, either.
I tried a lot, but I could NOT get the eye end (far left – is that an eye?) in focus. Of course, I didn’t know that in the field, not having my eyeball glasses on and looking through the glare of my phone screen, but I did try a number of shots with high hopes. One of our BLM range guys recently posted a pic of the same caterpillar, but he’s a plant guy (and an extraordinarily awesome one), not a bug guy, so I’m sure he can tell me the plant, if not the bug (!). If I reach him for an ID before this posts (or even after), I’ll update.
** Update from Ryan, BLM rangeland management specialist and all-around plant guy!:
“Cool that you’re seeing the same caterpillar! [He saw the same kind recently in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, southwest of Spring Creek Basin.] I’m very curious as to what species of butterfly/moth they will turn into, I’m not good at insect ID but will ask Nate West [BLM wildlife biologist]. The plant that those are on is a mustard species called Alyssum simplex, commonly just called madwort. It’s a pretty prevalent non-native annual that is really common around here, unfortunately. It’s a beautiful picture of the hair-structure on the caterpillar!” Thanks, Ryan!
The reason you can’t see Utah’s La Sal Mountains in this pic – way northwest of Spring Creek Basin, from the very far southeastern part of Spring Creek Basin – is because the rain/graupel/snow wasn’t through sending waves over them. 🙂 You CAN see, from right to left, Round Top, Flat Top (looks sloping), Filly Peak and the south-facing rimrocks. Disappointment Road is over to the left somewhere (not far)
From here, we’re looking over not much of the southern part of Spring Creek Basin Herd Management Area (the pic above this one has a perspective to the right of this one) but a lot of the south/southwestern part of Disappointment Valley (most but not all of the pinon-juniper woodlands as far as the eye can see). The near pinon-juniper is within Spring Creek Basin.
From the same spot now looking back to the south/southeast at another little rain/snow/graupel-fall, toward the Glade and Benchmark Lookout (hi, Rick and Linda! (I think they’re not at the fire lookout tower quite yet)). The near hills and pinon-juniper are all within Spring Creek Basin. The far, thickly treed ridges are partly (middle-ish ground) part of upper Disappointment Valley and partly (farther) part of San Juan National Forest lands beyond Disappointment Valley and its watershed.
And what the heck was I doing at the high end of a long drop? See the horse trail? 🙂 I was following where the sure-footed have gone before me (and not for the first time).
The above are in order of how I took them … hours apart from first to last.
And because you came here for the mustangs …
Mysterium, modeling her scruffy-chic look (fashion designers, take note – ha!) below Temple Butte. 🙂 Yes, those are a couple of cuts on the inside of her left hind leg, but she’ll heal quickly, as mustangs do!
Thanks, as always, for coming along for glimpses of this special world. 🙂
If you don’t like snakes, this post is not for you. Important note: No snake or human was harmed either hiking past or in the taking of these pix. 🙂
I’ve been looking for a particular band for about a week now. They showed up … then they disappeared again. That’s not unusual; even in only-22,000-acre Spring Creek Basin, there are lots of places for the ponies to roam out of sight of human eyes (and given the high ATV/UTV activity lately, including terrible, destructive off-road behavior, much better for them). But I was curious: Were they going south and taking advantage of the pond below/south of Round Top … or were they going deep east and taking advantage of the east-pocket pond? I’d seen water glinting in the RT pond a couple of weeks ago, but because of the very rough road and lack of loop access (because of bad washouts), I don’t often go back as far as the east pocket anymore (which is too bad because it’s one of my favorite areas of the basin).
So curiosity led to a hike up to the tip-top of Round Top. … From the bottom, I always say, “I’ll just go to the ‘bench’ and look from there … and then, if I don’t see anybody, I’ll complete the trek up to the top.” So that’s what I did. … You know I didn’t see anybody from the bench (well, I did see one band, but I knew where to look for them) and had to go all the way up. 🙂 It’s not a bad hike, and it’s really not long, and it does lift you high above the basin and gives TREMENDOUS views, and I love it up there. So I really need to do it more often. (According to my Strava details, it’s only 1.46 miles up and back, with an elevation gain of almost 360 feet, which included my brief stroll around the top to glass.)
I like to go to the different directions at the top – amazingly, it’s not that big – sit and glass. Not only is it fun to look for mustangs, but I like to reminisce about all the hikes I’ve done here, there and (almost) everywhere to find and get to them!
So I’d done my looking, and I’d even done some seeing of various bands that I’d already seen from “ground level.” But I didn’t see the particular band I wanted to see. To be fair, the view to the south is a lot more wide open than to the north/east/northeastish, so I was pretty sure they weren’t south at all.
The hike is enough of an exertion that you want to take your time at the top, and I’ve learned that if I *wait* and don’t get too impatient, something – or somebodies – might reveal itself or themselves.
Bingo. 🙂 I had stood up and stepped a few steps when I looked back *one last time*. It’s always that *one last time* when you see what you want to see! Way up in the east pocket. Boom; ponies. So I started the trek back down, half-running, eyes glued to the trail so I didn’t miss my footing. … I was within 40 yards (?) of the end of the trail and end of the road (which is where the trail starts, and this is a horse/deer/elk trail, not a trail-trail) when I heard the soft rattle.
It took a moment for the sound to reach my ears, to reach my brain, for my brain to process it, for me to stop my thoughts-elsewhere forward rush and to look back at the bush (small, a four-wing saltbush, maybe) I’d just passed. Was it entwined around the base? Uh, no. Then I spotted it. (I think I’ve written enough to warn you if you’re at all snake-squeamish??)
Do you see it?
The trail here looks more like a bit of an erosion channel than what most people think of as a *trail*. The pic is looking UP the trail – the trailhead (so to speak) is about 40 yards behind me – and I had come DOWN the trail. The bush isn’t included in this pic, but you can see the faint shadow of it over the rattler. The rock is immediately on the left side of the trail.
Because I was on a scouting mission to the top of Round Top, I had taken my binocs but not my camera, with its very long, very safe lens. So I took a pic first from “behind” the snake.
It seemed pretty relaxed, so I chanced a front version (you know, you CAN also zoom in with your phone camera!).
Interestingly about our little rattlers out here, you can see by its buttons that it’s not a super young snake. What you really maybe can’t tell from the pix (and no, I wasn’t going to put my hand out for a side-by-side comparison! oh, you silly readers! :)) is that it probably wasn’t more than a foot long. The rock in the first pic is bigger than my two fists held together.
What we have are the midget faded rattlesnakes (“western rattlesnakes”) or faded midget rattlesnakes (the recovering copy editor in me can’t stand non-consistent identifications! Looking at you, CPW). Check out this link to information from Colorado Parks and Wildlife … or this one from the Southeastern Hot Herp Society, written by an undergraduate student at Oklahoma State University. I was particularly interested in this little tidbit from the latter article: “The venom of the Midget Faded Rattlesnake is composed of a much higher neurotoxin than one would assume. … In fact concolor is the most toxic out of the (Western Rattlesnake clade, Crotalus oreganus).”
To paraphrase my dad (who likes bears): DO NOT MOLEST THE MIDGET FADED WESTERN RATTLESNAKES!
Seriously. I love them … from afar. 🙂 And in my experience, they are very (anthropomorphism alert) forgiving of random, idiot humans who nearly step on them in a brainless rush. … Pay attention out there. Every wild being and wild place deserves respect.
And because my day had an extremely happy ending, I’ll end it with this:
What an ending, right? 🙂 (And yes, I did find the ponies, and they’ll grace the blog in future posts.)
2-
5
mm) that resemble Dippin’ Dots or Styrofoam. These fragile, slushy particles are often called snow pellets and, unlike hard hail, crumble easily. They occur during wintry mix scenarios, causing sudden, slick conditions, and are identified in aviation reports as ‘GS’.”
Spring Creek Basin Mustangs 