Went to a local park today to try a new-to-me camera lens. Its south texas so theres rattlesnakes everywhere as it is, but right now theyre extremely active with all the heat we’ve been having lately.
About thirty minutes after I took this photo, I actually came across a diamondback while out wandering some trails nearby the park I took the title photo at. I was walking, saw it and heard it at the same time. I stood there and watched it for about 10 seconds before it started to take off into the nearby brush and for a few seconds I totally forgot I had a camera in my hand I was so intent on just watching it. This is it, slinking back off into the brush. If you zoom in, you can see 7 rattles, so the snake is about 7 years old. It was bigger around than my wrist, about the size of 2” pipe at the widest part of it, and maybe 3 or 3-1/2 foot long. Not the biggest one I have seen, some of them get longer than I am tall, but this one is still big enough to wreck your day if you tried to do anything more than steer clear of it.
Rattlesnakes are the most considerate of all the snakes. They give you loud and vigorous warning to give them space and back the fuck off before they attack. Contrast this with so many of the venomous snakes in the world who are like "oh you got too close to me even if you didn't know so fuck you die".
Rattlesnakes are becoming sick of human's shit apparently. I've only ever seen one, but rattle-less rattlesnakes are becoming more common than they once were. I wonder if humans are forcing an evolutionary diversion where they drop rattles because too many with rattles die for whatever reason.
I mean, who can blame them? Hell I've been sick of humanity's shit for years.
That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. It's typically a disadvantage for small creatures to give away their location.