A Baja Ratsnake we found late at night in Baja California Sur, showing some iridescence in the camera flash.

A Northern Cottonmouth from a quick trip to Texas in 2024. In about 6 hours, I lost count of how many there were. These are large, interesting snakes with complex social behavior, which are unfortunately well stuck in the monster that is the American urge to believe in nonsense. All of them, as did every […]

A Malabar Pitviper from southern India a couple of years ago on a wet night in the Western Ghats. After seeing a few of them, the convergent similarities in form and behavior with new world vipers, like the eyelash vipers, is amazing.

Banded Rock Rattlesnake from southeastern Arizona. These snakes, typically the males, can have a metallic blue-green shine along the back and outline of black bands, often against other bright pinks, blues, and orange. It matches the lichen covering rocks where they live. This one is a good example of a mature male of the species […]

To another small snake, this is a terrifying sight. A venomous snake-eating specialist that will take prey almost as large as it is by clamping down tight and flipping over, using its atypically long body as an anchor. After releasing, it follows the mortally wounded snake, face to face, watching it until it either dies […]

Can you tell the age of a rattlesnake from counting the segments of its rattle? For the most part: no. But sometimes, it’s easy. This young Western Diamondback Rattlesnake was found late in the monsoon season. From its rattle, it can be seen it’s shed its skin exactly two times – once to reveal the […]

Sonoran Sidewinders can be incredibly common in the right habitat, but that doesn’t often put them in the path of homeowners in the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Of the six species of rattlesnakes that can be found at the native habitat contact zones, this species is the first to disappear whenever roads come in. They […]

A pair of Arizona Black Rattlesnakes take the prime spot at the den, with a half dozen or more shuffling throughout the day behind them. For these snakes, it’s early den egress time, when they stage at and near the den for awhile before heading out for the season. This den is shared by two […]

One of the many Zebra-tailed lizards running around a popular beach in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Unlike about every other situation where we were wading through beach dune sands looking for lizards and snakes, this spot had a guy with a cooler selling ice-cold cervesas. This needs to be normalized in herpetology.

A large canebrake rattlesnake (timber rattlesnake) from forests of the southeast. This would not be a fun environment to live in if you were a squirrel.