#71 - "Playing Possum" from Animas, New Mexico

My left hand suddenly became wet and I noticed a few droplets of blood on my hiking shorts. Dripping from my wrist, the blood fell to coagulate on the dusty red earth beside Highway 81. I had been driving toward the Mexico border and gasping in awe at the spectacular lightning storms over the Animas and Peloncillo Mountains. Now I was standing on the roadside. It was still at least an hour until sunset.

I uncurled the fingers of my left hand to view the source of the warm wet blood. In my palm rested a perfectly healthy Texas Horned Lizard. I had temporarily restrained about a dozen of these spiky broad and flat lizards over the past few weeks to pose them for roadside images, but this is the first that had squirted blood from its eyes.

Ethology is the science of animal behavior. Ethologists use the term tonic immobility or thanatosis to describe what we like to call playing possum. It also is known as apparent death or by slang terms like feigning death or playing dead.

The Virginia Opossum or "possum" is a marsupial that has an involuntary response to perceived threats that results in mimicking both the appearance and smell of a sickly or dead animal. But it is far from the only animal that has evolved apparent death behavior. Even animals you might think of as invincible predators like sharks have highly developed tonic immobility behaviors. I've witnessed similar behavior in spiders, beetles, treefrogs, and iguanas, and in alligators turned onto their backs. 

Horned lizards have suffered being called horny toads or horned frogs. These thorny reptiles can hardly be mistaken for amphibians, but their scientific name Phrynosoma means "toad-bodied". Their rough scales are ornamented with incredible spikes and they have broad and flattened bodies. Their coloration serves as effective camouflage. But they also employ a wide variety of means to avoid predation. When a potential threat approached their first defense is to remain still to avoid detection. If approached more closely they often will run in short bursts, zig-zagging and stopping abruptly to confuse the predator's visual acuity. Should the threat continue they puff up their bodies to erect their spines and appear larger and more difficult to swallow. At least eight species, including the Texas species P. cornutum I have encountered in southwestern New Mexico, also have the ability to squirt an aimed stream of blood from the corners of the eyes. This blood spurt may reach a distance of up to 5 feet. They squirt blood by restricting the blood flow leaving the head, which increases blood pressure and ruptures tiny vessels around their eyelids. This incredible behavior not only confuses predators, but also the blood tastes foul to some predators like canines and felines. Both wild and domestic dogs and cats pose a threat to horned lizards, as do predatory birds that apparently don't find the blood squirting so unappealing. For the record, this "ocular autohemorrhaging" has also been documented in other lizards including the Yarrow's Spiny Lizard that I also encounter regularly here in southwestern New Mexico.

Texas Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum), Hidalgo County, New Mexico

Another reptile from this region exhibits interesting behavior when threatened. A hog-nosed snake will roll onto its back to appear to be dead when threatened by a predator, while a foul-smelling, volatile fluid oozes from its body. Its gaping mouth often is bloody. However, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, it can be 'tricked' into erecting its tongue. As I photographed this Mexican Hog-nosed Snake (Heterodon kennerlyi), a guy I met on the road was wagging his finger at the snake to get it to flick out its tongue for a better image. 

A Mexican Hog-nosed Snake feigns death

Other threat displays do not feign sickness or death. Rattlesnakes have evolved a familiar warning, but in truth many snakes rattle their tails. Rattlesnakes, members of the most highly evolved of all snakes - pitvipers, just have taken it to another level. They have hollow, interlocking segments of keratin [modified scales] at the tips of their tails. The contraction of tail muscles produces an incredible warning sound, but a kingsnake or other snake can produce a nice buzzing by vibrating its tail when in contact with dry leaves. Still, the rattlesnake has perfected the warning. It can vibrate its tail up to 50 times a minute and maintain the pace for three hours. One night two Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes I interacted with backed away from me and both ended up secreted in the grasses and other cover surrounding an agave. I forgot to record GPS coordinates and returned to the spot ten or fifteen minutes later to do so and found them still buzzing away and the sound could be heard thirty or more feet from the bush.

And, of course, many snakes hiss and puff up their bodies to appear larger. Chameleons are just one well-known lizard that, like our horned lizard, inflates its body when threatened. Birds, mammals ... there are probably few animals that don't have representatives that employ the 'look bigger" defense. But let's go back to snakes ... One dramatic example of puffing up the body in threat display is the cobra's hood. Cobra skeletons have special elongated ribs that erect the loose skin and scales of their necks when muscles are contracted and they flatten their necks. This hood may be displayed in the familiar defensive pose, but also as a cobra is moving as it slithers away. Our Mexican Hog-nosed Snake has a very cobra-like hood. Last night's snake never went as far as tonic immobility or apparent death. It huffed and puffed like most snakes, but also flattened and spread its hood to great effect. You can see its flattened neck "hood" in the image below.

Mexican Hog-nosed Snake (Heterodon kennerlyi), Grant County, New Mexico

#70 - "Website Update" from Rodeo, New Mexico

Before I hit the road in January I created a new website and parked it at mjacobi.com. I had wanted a separate web presence that would feature road trip related content kept separate from the exoticfauna.com that had long been my online home. I have built websites for years, most from scratch with my own html and css code. Many were extensive multi-page sites that featured loads of content such as my monograph on the African bush vipers and my database of the world's tarantula species, but my present exoticfauna.com had been reduced to a single page that condensed an overview of my career projects related to herpetofauna and arachnofauna. I decided that my new "life on the road" focused site would be created using a WYSIWYG click-and-drag page creator and used GoDaddy's Website Builder to create mjacobi.com and hosted it there.

While I've been on the road I've increasingly found a "rv life" website uninteresting/unnecessary and the Blogger [Google] blog platform cumbersome. At the same time, I've really wanted to rebuild what used to be called exoticfauna.com and feature more of my images for those who don't want to navigate over to SmugMug or Instagram [but, yeah, clicking a link isn't hard work so try it!]. A single website made sense and I chose the URL containing my name over the very content-specific "Exotic Fauna". At mjacobi.com I will eventually even have my music.

As of this writing, my new mjacobi.com has launched on SquareSpace. Today's online web creators are so clean, elegant and powerful that I decided laboring over code to be silly, and have simply customized one of their templates to my liking. I had planned to finish the site before its public launch, but when I cancelled my GoDaddy hosting and transferred the domain over to SquareSpace things happened quicker than I intended. So, I have been hurriedly been working on the site whenever I am not out hiking or road cruising. As of this morning, it's finally something headed in the right direction.

At mjacobi.com you now find this blog, of course, but you also can view images, read bios, view and download a selected group of my publications and more. More content will be added every day (especially images) so please bookmark and revisit often. ExoticFauna is still online, but I have also cancelled that hosting and will take the mostly biographic content that is currently there and turn it into part of the "about" homepage bios at mjacobi.com.

I hope you're having a good Sunday Funday. I am exhausted/feeling a bit rundown & ill so after spending the last couple of hours tweaking the new website and now writing this, methinks it is time for a siesta.

Peace & love & good happiness stuff, MJ

#69 - "Road Cruising" from Rodeo, New Mexico

R O A D   C R U I S I N G 

The night before last I turned south out of the gates at Rusty’s RV Ranch and headed south on Highway 80. One half mile later I turned to the east and followed Highway 9 toward Animas. The posted speed limit was 55 and would be 65, but my dusty white-gold F150 creeped along at about 22 mph. It was 6:40 p.m. and the temperature was about 92ºF. 33ºC. Sunset would be at about 8:15. 

I’ve mentioned “road cruising” and thought it time to elucidate on the practice of traveling mostly deserted paved desert roads at dusk and into the night in search of serpents and other crepuscular wildlife. This effective method allows snake hunters to cover ground and encounter animals drawn to the pavement. At dusk ectothermic (poikilothermic) animals like reptiles take advantage of heat energy trapped in the asphalt. They have no furnace of their own, and have evolved wondrous ways of attaining optimal body temperature. The blazing sun might have cooked them and they might have escaped the heat of day in burrows or beneath rocks or other cover, but as the sun falls into the horizon some reptiles thermoregulate and digest meals by using nature’s hot water bottle. This behavior varies throughout the year as the contrast between daytime highs and surface temperature beneath the sun and that of evening roads differs. The roads may hold heat into the dark, but other reptiles are just on the move. Roads are the arteries of man, and these thoroughfares cut through wildlife habitat. Natural movements by snakes, whether hunting or mating or dispersing or whatever, cannot help but cross the roads. By road cruising the snake enthusiast can search much territory in a night and chance upon wildlife just moving from point A to B. 

The night before last I crept east and my first sighting was a dead-on-road (DOR) Sonoran Gopher Snake that was perhaps three feet in length before its vehicular slaughter rearranged its anatomy. People are oblivious. That sad truth becomes more so every year as we become more device-oriented/obsessed and have so many LED lights and techno-gadetry inside our vehicles. Other drivers are focused on the sunset or birds or that next mile. Few notice anything on the pavement. Others are just pondscum. They see a snake on the road and intentionally aim their wheels at it. To them the only snake is a good snake and I can only fantasize about them being eaten alive by diseased and plague-carrying rats and other rodents in a snake-less world. They are far too ignorant to understand how beneficial snakes are or how every single organism is integral to its ecosystem. 

After passing the grotesque remains of that first Sonoran Gopher Snake, I came upon another. It was very much alive. Big and beautiful, its golden scales shimmered in the light of dusk as it headed off the road towards the rocky red desert. I pressed the button for my truck’s hazard lights and moved slightly off the road. I don’t like to move too far off the pavement if I can avoid it as you never know what animals are in the scrub at the roadside. Vehicles are few and far between and I typically have them to myself except for the ubiquitous Border Patrol trucks. I already knew what the snake was so there was no need for my snake hook. I only use this to move venomous snakes off the road and position them for photographs. I now wear a pouch on my belt holding a point-and-shoot camera and always snatch my iPhone as I use it to record GPS coordinates (waypoints; Gaia GPS app) and dictate field notes (Voice Memos app). Of course, it also has a mediocre camera. I jumped out of the truck and grabbed the four-foot-plus snake about eighteen inches from the tip of its tail. Sonoran Gopher Snakes hiss and puff and strike and will bite, but this isn’t my first rodeo. I moved it farther off the road without any blood loss. The scent of snake musk filled the air. The gorgeous snake only struck at me once, but it huffed and puffed and when I set it down for photos it continued to hiss loudly. I decided to head back to the truck for my other cameras and snake hook, and then continued to capture images of it. Snakes usually are calmer when you manipulate them on a hook (metal tree branch) rather than clutching them like straws. I used the hook to lift the snake onto a rock for some better images one of which you will see below. After recording my data and noting time and temperature it was time to bid farewell to Mr. Huff and Puff and push on. The time was now 7:01 and the desert was long from cooling. 

In Animas I headed south on Highway 338. At this junction there were a few other vehicles, but I continued my slow crawl with my eyes fixed on the pavement. Just outside of town I saw a minivan with a canoe strapped to the roof pulled off the side of the road. As I approached, I noticed a guy about my age with a long ponytail taking a picture of something using his smartphone. His cell phone was held only about a foot off the roadside shoulder so I knew he was photographing something that would be of interest to me. I slowly creeped up and rolled down my passenger window. I became excited when he told me that it was a Mexican Hog-nosed Snake and put my truck into reverse and aimed it off the road a bit far enough behind him. He and I both continued to capture images of the snake, which was in full-on possum mode. Hog-nosed snakes are masters of feigning death. They roll onto their backs with mouth agape and even secrete blood in their mouths. The mistake they make wouldn’t be noticed by a predator. They will move their tongues and hold them out erect like only a live snake could do. Me and my fellow road-cruiser (I would later learn that his name is Clay) got to chatting. I noticed he had Washington State license plates as I once did. I told him I was out looking for snakes and he showed me a bunch of great finds of his own using his smartphone. Since we were both headed the same direction and doing the same thing, and I was duly impressed by his ability to notice a diminutive juvenile hog-nosed snake, we agreed that I would follow him about 1/4 mile back and would join him when he found something and stopped. I stayed back far enough that I might see something he didn’t or that came onto the road after he passed, but so that I could usually see his tail lights. It was getting darker. Clay and I continued down the road until the pavement ends and then turned around and continued our road-cruising as we headed back north. We found another Sonoran Gopher Snake. He stopped for a Groundsnake, but it raced off the road before he could catch it. We stopped for a Texas Horned Lizard. We stopped for a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake (WDB). And so on. 

It was about 10 pm when I fell farther behind him and encountered another WDB. It was a pretty juvenile. Stopping to photograph it and record data increased the separation between my truck and Clay’s van and I later continued back to Animas alone. When I turned west on Highway 9 and passed Valley Mercantile I noticed his van parked near its fuel pumps. I decided to pull in and top off my tank and have one last chat with him. A group of young “good ole boys” in a big customized truck seemed to be eyeing him with ill intention. When I pulled in and got out they eyed me and then squealed their tires and kicked up a dust storm as they headed the way Clay and I had come. I walked over to his vehicle and he said that the young locals definitely looked like they wanted to hassle him or were otherwise up to no good. We chatted and said our goodbyes after discussing some trails in the Chiricahuas. I went back to the fuel pump and filled my truck. As drove to the exit he stopped and tapped his horn twice. I thought he was just sounding a final goodbye. But he jumped out of his van and exclaimed “there’s an atrox right here”. That’s the species name of the Western Diamondback (WDB) and, sure enough, our last snake of the night was a gorgeous four foot WDB slowly crawling across the pavement right at Valley Mercantile. 

Yesterday I finally visited the Chiricahua Desert Museum (CDM). Earlier I drove into the Chiris to visit the Chiricahua Nature Shop at the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History. I had intended to hike the Basin Trail again after Clay had told me about finding some bucket list snakes along the mountain trails that include Basin. However, I did not sleep well and was exhausted. So I decided it would be tourism gift shop day. As I pulled into CDM, I saw Bob Ashley out front. Owner/director of the museum and co-owner of NARBC, the national reptile show where I used to exhibit during its Tinley Park (Chicago) stop, Bob and I don’t know each other well but I thought he’d recognize me. I used to deal more with his partner Brian Potter and also longtime colleague-friend Russ Gurley who helps with their shows. But Bob at least acted like he knew me, shook my hand and welcomed me to CDM. I told him I was registered for the Biology of Snakes conference he was hosting/organizing at the end of July and he got back to work on his big Baja Blue Rock Lizard enclosure while I spent some money on books, hats and cards in his amazing gift shop and then toured his incredible, mostly-reptile oriented museum and its live exhibits showcasing over thirty species of rattlesnakes and many other denizens of the desert. Next door to the gift shop and museum is his Apache Museum and Geronimo Event Center where the conference will be held. The Apache Museum features Geronimo and other Native American history. I spent all of two minutes in there as history/culture is not my thing and it seemed the air conditioning wasn’t on and it was hotter than hell. I then toured the beautiful gardens and outdoor displays where Bob worked on the lizard enclosure. He invited me to return on the weekend when he would have more time to give me a little behind-the-scenes personal tour of his impressive complex. 

But this is a story about road cruising … Last night I decided to travel exactly the same roads and perhaps run into Clay again. This area is “closer to home” than the roads I have cruised that lead to Hachita and south to the border at Antelope Wells. I didn’t see Clay or anyone else other than Border Patrol. I actually had two nice conversations with Border Patrol officers that offset the story I told here of the officer I had encountered a couple weeks earlier when I went all the way down to Antelope Wells. The first pair stopped when I moved off the road so I wouldn’t have to speed up and chatted with me for awhile. They were young and friendly and so much more officer material than the fat country bumpkin I had met near Antelope Wells. They asked me what part of Illinois I was from and let me know if I had any troubles to flag them down. We wished each other a safe night and I was left with a better impression of Border Patrol. Later, long after dark, I stopped to photograph a rattlesnake just after turning around to head back north and a solo officer pulled over to make sure I was OK. I just said I’m a snake photographer and there is a rattlesnake right next to your truck and he wished me a safe evening. 

I’ll close with a brief report of last night’s “cruise”. I don’t have time now to process my photographs and insert them into the blog so please check my Instagram tonight. There already are plenty of pix from the previous night.

I road cruised 75 miles over the course of 4 hours (6:45-10:45).

1. 7:15 pm. 85ºF - Sonoran Gopher Snake (live, ~24”) - Had just started south on Highway 338. 
2. 7:29 pm, 82ºF - Patch-nosed Snake (DOR. ~28”) 
3. 8:02 pm, 77ºF - Texas Horned Lizard (live) - Just north of Mile Marker 13. 
4. 8:43 pm, 76ºF - Green Prairie Rattlesnake (live, ~16”) - Just north of Mile Marker 23
5. 9:05 pm, 76ºF - Western Diamondback Rattlesnake [WDB] (live, ~30”) - Just after turning around and heading back north
6. 10:20 pm, 70ºF - WDB (live, ~18”) - Just west of Animas on Highway 9
7. 10:28 pm, 70ºF - WDB (live, ~28”) - About four miles west of Animas 

Other wildlife seen: jackrabbits, more jackrabbits, cottontails, mule deer, Ferruginous Hawk, open range cattle, etc. 

The Green Prairie Rattlesnake juvenile was the jewel of the night! Such a pretty little youngster. This species is much less commonly seen road cruising than WDB. This snake is known for its dangerous mix of haemotoxic and neurotoxic venom components and envenomation causes severe respiratory distress and is extremely threatening to life.

     —   All the best, M

#68 - "New Beginnings" from Rodeo, New Mexico

My Pikey: Shunpiking & Boondocking; the Gypsy Life Blog now migrates here and absorbs my former Kiss My Big Hairy Spider blog. There will only be one blog and it will not have a clever (or lengthy) name. Instead each post will have a topical title in addition to my present whereabouts. I hope to flavor my travelogues with some educational material and perhaps increase my readership.

Following this initial post I will duplicate my last post from the Google+ Blogger site here and then switch to posting herein.