Kingsnake Attacks and Eats Rattlesnake

Snakes that eat other snakes are often called “kings;” for example, the King Cobra. The most common, widespread North American snake with this feeding habit is the beautiful common kingsnake, Lampropeltis getula. Readers of this blog know that the kingsnake is my favorite snake.

Common kingsnake

Like all snakes, kingsnakes have several anatomical features that allow them to eat prey that is actually bigger than their heads. These features include a specialized jaw that allows the mouth to open nearly 180 degrees, very stretchable skin, and lack of a breastbone, which allows the ribs to expand as the meal moves down the gullet. If you had the same adaptations, you would be able to swallow a cantaloupe.

My fellow docent at Tohono Chul Park, Carlton King, was lucky enough to observe a common kingsnake attacking, subduing, and swallowing a fairly big Western diamondback rattlesnake in his neighborhood. With his permission, I am pleased to share these remarkable photos with you.

The kingsnake is suffocating the rattlesnake and getting a grip on its head.

The kingsnake has started to swallow the rattlesnake. Note that the kingsnake’s head is upside down in this photo.

The rattlesnake makes its way down the kingsnake’s gullet…

…and now everything has been swallowed but the tail and rattle.

Here is the kingsnake with the rattlesnake complete inside it. See how small its head looks!

Thanks again, Carlton! 

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HOT HOT HOT June Rove

It is supposed to get to 109 today, but was only in the nineties when I did my weekly Rove at Tohono Chul Park. My roving partner and I had a great time. Even in the heat of summer, there is so much beauty. Here, for example, is the coral bean that greets visitors at the front gate:

We saw other beautiful flowers, and a number of birds, including “the usual suspects” (Gambel’s quail, cactus wrens, white-winged doves, verdins, and Bell’s vireo, common here in the warm weather). We also saw, at the top of big nest high in an ash tree, the fuzzy white head of a baby Cooper’s hawk. We’d been wondering if the nest was active, and now we know! In addition we saw desert spiny, whiptail, and zebratail lizards, and one smallish diamondback that was waiting patiently near a mouse hole in the ground. 

At the back of the Riparian area, a trichocereus was in bloom:

In the same area we cooled off by watching one of my favorite fountains, the Pot Wall.

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New Focus

I haven’t been posting here often because so many of my nature observations are now made at Tohono Chul Park, where I’m a docent. I have decided to change the focus of my blog, and include what I see and hear at TCP.
(This beautiful male Gambel’s quail was photographed at the Park.)
Quick quail update: we regularly have more quail than I can count roosting in the front yard now.  Literally dozens. They fill the dorm tree, the pyracantha bush, and the bougainvillea, though since we’re having a hard freeze tonight the bougainvillea may no longer be a suitable place to bunk.
 
Today in the Park it was very cold, but I got to see a snake anyway (a day without snakes is like a day without sunshine). One of the volunteers couldn’t access his water valve box because a juvenile rattlesnake was brumating in it. This may have been one of the rattlers that hatched underneath our organpipe cactus in July (see above). Our herpetologist, Ed, asked that the young diamondback be left alone till Wednesday, when the night temps will be considerably warmer.
Last week one of the grounds crew caught a juvenile black-headed grosbeak with a broken wing. She was going to take it to wildlife rehab, but someone let it go. I heard today that it had been seen in a particular part of the Park, eating chiles and caterpillars (yum!). Then, before I left this morning, I saw it, in what looked like very good, safe habitat, hopping around. I hope it finds a warm place to sleep.