The Backyard Zoo

by Jim Dunlap

"Sidewinder"

He’s little, an almost newborn actually. He sits in an aquarium on my desk, all eight inches of him, enjoying his sun lamp. One must measure snakes in inches because they have no feet. Read quickly now. He wiles away the day sticking his tongue out at everything and lives for the next dead mouse that descends from the heavens by way of my carefully guided, extra long, tweezers. He is a sidewinder rattlesnake of the kind I watched on Walt Disney specials in my childhood.

The sidewinder has moves that would be applauded on any dance floor. This is a snake that uses coils of his body to propel himself across the hot sands of the desert southwest. This permits crawling over hot surfaces with little danger of overheating because of the greatly reduced contact between the snake’s body and the ground. I still imagine that if a snake could talk he would be making sounds like, "Ooch! Hot! Ouch! Oww!" much like a bare-footed person traversing a hot beach.

This sidewinder came from Imperial County, California and I am still trying to gather the circumstances. He is most common in areas of loose, windblown sand. Most active in the early part of the night, he would spend the day in a mouse hole or buried in the sand. His main food consists of small rodents and lizards. He grows to a petite length of twenty inches and is also known as a horned rattlesnake due to a scaled "hornlike" projection above each eye.

I recently completed a new book titled "Snakes of Ireland." There are no snakes in Ireland. It is a short book. Although I have tried, it is all but impossible to make a snake laugh. I think it is because you can't pull his leg. At least I know he could not sue me for slander. He wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. I gotta million of 'em.

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