Scales Reptiles

Four years apart (the pictures) #leopardtortoise

Happy tokays(each picture is from one female) #tokaygecko #gekkogecko

Beckman inspecting her newest babies #boaimperator #boasofinstagram

We just ordered our shirts:)

Babies! :) Sonoran Gopher Snakes #pituophis #pituophiscatenifer #sonorangophersnake

Little girl was looking good today #boaimperator #aneryboa

Happy #RattlesnakeFriday! What is this? Pro-rattlesnake article in The New York Times!? Yes. Yes, it is... The Misunderstood, Maligned Rattlesnake The beautiful... creature in the flower bed was not a threat to us. It was a gift. by Margaret Renkl Read below or at www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/opinion/rattlesnakes.html The cabin my husband and I borrowed last week was first built in Kentucky on our friends’ family land more than 100 years ago. The timbers are rough-hewed, and you can still see the bark on some of the beams as the builders conserved every inch of the trees they felled from a forest that must have seemed endless. Our friends dismantled the cabin in 1987 and brought the timbers back to Tennessee, where they used them to build a new cabin on the Cumberland Plateau. It is now perched at the edge of a windswept bluff overlooking Lost Cove, one of the most biodiverse places in the world, right where the heavens come together with the earth. In the five days we spent there to celebrate our anniversary, we walked in an endless garden Queen Anne’s lace and forest tickseed, Carolina horsenettle and narrowleaf vervain, annual fleabane and zigzag spiderwort and oxeye daisies were all growing wild. The woods were filled with songbirds: blue jays and goldfinches and tufted titmice and chickadees and bluebirds and even the secretive scarlet tanager. Tanagers generally keep to the treetops, but the trees growing in the soil of Lost Cove reach up to the edge of the bluff. From our own perch, we had a bird’s-eye view of the trees. We watched a pair of red-tailed hawks teaching their fledglings to hunt. We listened to a pileated woodpecker’s wild cry from the top of a dead tree and heard a red fox barking in the dark as two barred owls called to each other: Who, who, who cooks for you? At Lost Cove, the nights are as beautiful as the days. The fireflies come out to fill the forest just as the stars come out to fill the skies. The sound that woke me in the first stirrings of dawn one morning was the cry of a small animal a mouse, perhaps, or a chipmunk in the claws, or jaws, of a predator. It was a piteous sound coming from directly beneath our window. The creature cried out, just once, and then was silent. I’ve mostly made peace with the fact that the peaceable kingdom is anything but. All day long and all night long, too, every creature on that bluff, like every creature deep in the cove itself and every creature in my suburban yard in Nashville and every creature scurrying down every city alleyway, is both trying to eat and trying not to be eaten. An insect-eating scarlet tanager is not inherently less violent than the owl that eats songbirds. A rabbit is not somehow better for eating wildflowers than a fox is for eating rabbits. This is how the natural world works, and there is no wishing it were otherwise. But knowing about such suffering is not the same as being a witness to such suffering, and I did not go back to sleep that early morning. My ambivalence in this matter of mortality explains why I was both completely fascinated and completely terrified by the small rattlesnake my husband found curled up next to the front porch of the cabin later that day. I was afraid, but I wasn’t only afraid. I was also a little bit in love with the magnificent creature that was calmly surveying us from behind a laurel, making not a sound. Really, what 32nd wedding anniversary would be complete without the appearance of some perfectly timed memento mori, in this case a deadly pit viper? Or without an ensuing marital debate? It has to be a copperhead, my husband said. They’re all over the place up here. Rattlesnakes are rare. The markings are all wrong, I said. It has to be a timber rattler. It’s way too small to be a timber rattler, my husband said. Rattlesnakes don’t start out five feet long, I said. Throughout this lengthy conversation, which I have truncated for the sake of your sanity, the snake in question did not stir. It was utterly motionless, so still it provided what my husband believed was unassailable evidence of his point: If this is a rattlesnake, why isn’t it rattling? One of his former students settled the question after my husband texted him a picture of the snake. Jackson Roberts is now a doctoral candidate in herpetology at Louisiana State University, and he confirmed that we had in fact been visited by a young timber rattlesnake. You were really lucky to get to see one, he told us. They’re very shy, and they’re becoming more rare as we clear out their habitat. And as people kill them. I asked Mr. Roberts why the snake hadn’t deployed its trademark warning device. The rattle is a last-ditch defensive strategy against predators, he said. They’d much rather hunker down and wait for trouble to leave. To a rattlesnake, in other words, we are the trouble. We are the predators. Timber rattlesnakes are declining in many states, including here in Tennessee, and it’s illegal to kill one. It’s actually illegal to kill any snake in Tennessee unless it poses a direct threat to you. Thing is, there’s never any reason to consider a snake a direct threat. Unless you’re the one posing a direct threat to the snake if, say, you’re trying to kill it a snake will simply sit quietly and wait for you to go away. Barely two days after this peaceful rattlesnake entered my ken and installed itself in my dreams, the Orianne Society, a conservation nonprofit based in Tiger, Ga., started a new initiative to celebrate rattlesnakes. Every day for the month leading up to World Snake Day on July 16, Orianne is posting clips on social media of chief executive Chris Jenkins talking about snake biology, safe hiking in rattlesnake country, what to do when you encounter a snake, etc. basically anything that might encourage people to stop killing snakes. Rattlesnakes, and snakes in general, are the most misunderstood, the most maligned, the most persecuted animals on the planet, Dr. Jenkins said in a phone interview last week. One of the most important things we can do for the conservation of any snake, and rattlesnakes in particular, is education. A fear of rattlesnakes is not unfounded. My own cousin’s maternal grandfather died decades ago when he stepped on a rattlesnake too far out in the woods to get medical help in time to treat the bite. To the snake, he was a threat. To his family, that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered to them was that he was dead. But the truth is that an animal can be dangerous and still pose almost no threat to people. According to Dr. Jenkins, snakebites are rare, and up to 50 percent of rattlesnake strikes are dry bites in which the snake doesn’t actually inject venom. Nevertheless, our culture has taught us to associate serpents not only with danger but also with evil. The only antidote to these associations is information. Unless you’re actively trying to catch or kill a rattlesnake, the chance of being bitten is very low, said Dr. Jenkins. Many more people die every year from horses whether they get thrown off or they get kicked than from snakes. Many more people die from bees and wasps. If you encounter a rattlesnake, you should be excited. It’s a symbol that you’re in a wild place, a special place. It’s hard to imagine a time when rattlesnakes, no matter how shy and how peaceful, will be welcomed without fear. But I like to think we can still complicate our perceptions, as my friend Erica Wright writes in her forthcoming book, Snake. Perhaps we can yet learn, as she puts it, to recognize the grace alongside the fangs and venom. Complicated. Sublime. Awful and beautiful at once. When we checked in the last light of day, our rattlesnake visitor was still sitting quietly in the flower bed. By morning it was gone, vanished into the dappled light of the forest or a shady crevice of that ancient limestone bluff. We never saw it again. Photo: Timber rattlesnakes Kevin Stohlgre

Hatching season is starting to pick up some speed. Tremper albino and a single twin , he’s so, so tiny. #leopardgecko

One of the girls we’re growing up slowly #boaimperator

"My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail is a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!" Smaug J.R.R. Tolkien, Inside Information, The Hobbit

Good morning #easternboxturtle