MidMay
The prickly pears are blooming now.
The chollas too.
A little color variation.
Here are some pics of a pair of children-of-the-earth who live in holes in the ground at the edge of my camp:
Children-of-the-earth are arachnids, (Count the legs), and thus carnivores. (the fifth pair of legs are actually palps (mouth parts, lips if you will, kiss, kiss)).
Those huge fangs supposedly have no venom at all. I'm looking for volunteers to test that.
The slimmer one (which I assume male) is about 2.5 inches long. The more compact one is about 2 in.
I took the pictures at night with a flashlight and red-eye reducing camera flash. The last few pics, I kept trying to catch her (?) with her palps out feeling for prey.
Here's a couple of pics of a sidewinder (Mohave rattler) I saw in the road. It's flattened like
that because I almost ran over it before I saw it and backed up. It was so freaked out
that it didn't move at all until sometime after I left.
I took the pictures at night with a headlight and red-eye reducing camera flash. The second snake I've seen so far this year, this was a young one.
It was appx. 1.5 ft. The four rattles smoothly taper to a point with none missing. Rattlers get a new rattle every time they shed, not necessarily once a year. Check out it's horns.
Here's a weird one, this is a worm snake. The dime is to show scale. Appx. 8 inches long and about an eighth inch diameter. I had to be very careful not to hurt it. The flashlight light was very distressful to it, and it was fragile, so I wasn't able to examine it very well before I had to let it go again. The pics are not focused well.
The QuickTime movie is about 1MB, if you don't have QT, here is a copy of the free player I got with the camera.
You need the dat file too if you don't want to install online from the slow Apple site.
Download them both into the same folder.(My Documents ?)
Here's some installation tips:
