Wet Coachwhip Snake

I got a video of a Coachwhip Snake (Masticophis flagellum testaceous) swimming in the irrigation ditch. I know a lot of people have trouble with snakes, but they are really quite beautiful. It’s not often I see a Coachwhip Snake taking a swim. After we got back from checking on the owls and walking in the bosque this morning, I wrote a song to go with the video, appropriately named Coachwhip Snake. I recorded the song and put it all together in the above video this afternoon. Enjoy!

Coachwhip Snake
Lyrics: Timothy Price
Music: Timothy Price

Verse
Slither swimming in the ditch
Sloppy sine wave between the wake
Slips the bank scales in cross-stitch
Stops and eyes me with suspicion

Bridge
We stand we stare he and me
Paparazzo and snake admiration

Chorus
Masticophis flagellum testaceous
That’s what I said
Beautiful snake, braided scales
Colubrid whipped up in western red

Verse
Slither swimming in the ditch
Sloppy sine wave between the wake

Bridge
We stand we stare he and me
Paparazzo and snake admiration

Chorus
Masticophis flagellum testaceous
That’s what I said
Beautiful snake, braided scales
Colubrid whipped up in western red

Sphingidae — Sphinx Moth

A Sphingidae — Spinx Moth, AKA Hummingbird Hawk-Moth, was fluttering around feeding on our Purple Salvia with the bees and the butterflies. I made a short video of it and added one of our recordings of Caña for background music (I’m playing and Laurie’s dancing). The only sound on the original video was the wind.

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Challenges

There seems to be all kinds of challenges in the blogosphere, mostly photo challenges, and writing challenges. Here are a few challenges I recorded.

The first challenge was the song that started out as a drum track that Joel put together. He sent me the track and gave me the challenge to make a song out of it. I laid down a bass track, followed by a rhythm guitar track. I made up a vocal track on the spot, so I have not written down the lyrics, then I laid down the lead guitar track. One take for each track. I named the song  Joel’s Beat.

 

The second challenge was when I was finally able to get my car washed (car washes had been closed under the lockdown). I washed my car and what did I get? Dust and muddy kitty prints all over the lid.

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The third challenge was for Big Baby Owl who had flown over to another branch on the cottonwood tree, then decided to climb the trunk of the tree to get up where Mama Owl was perched high above her. Big Baby Owl climbed and climbed, flapped her wings over the more difficult parts, and finally got into a fork in the tree about 10 feet from Mama Owl. She looked up at Mama Owl and Mama Owl flew off. Big Baby Owl was devastated. She just stood in the fork of the tree with her head bowed (click on the photos for an enlarged slide show).

 

The fourth challenge was photographing black Irises that are bleached purple in our intense sunshine. The irises look almost black to the naked eye, but properly exposed photos show how purple black really is.

 

The fifth challenge was doing super wide-angle photos of Spunk and living to write about it and post the photos.

 

Buckeye and the Painted Lady

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A buckeye butterfly with nice edges.

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Painted lady with very clean edges.

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Buckeye that is a little ragged around the edges.

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Sharp and clean.

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Rough and rugged.

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A tail in this tale of butterflies on purple salvia.

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Bottoms up and tally-ho I got my purple salvia!

Happy Snake

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Blue happily digesting dinner on her hot spot. She has a cute mustache.

If you ever wondered what a happy snake looks like, this is about as good as it gets. Blue was content and happily lounging on her hot spot last night after having two large rats for dinner. I feed her pre-killed rats once a month that I buy frozen, keep in the freezer, and thaw out a couple of days before feeding time. Then I heat the thawed rats in hot water before I feed them to her.

She decided she was really hungry last night after she shed her skin a few days ago. She was striking at anything that moved, mostly me, as I got her from her encloser into her feeding box. When I threw the heated rat in the feeding box, she grabbed it and constricted it like it was live prey. But then instead of just eating it, she had to play with it for a while. This is the only snake I know of that plays with her food. It’s very annoying because I want her to eat her rats so I can put her back in her enclosure.

How does a snake play with a dead rat you may be asking? After she’s constricted it for a while, she will bite it and drag it around the feeding box, push it around the feeding box with her nose, start to eat it, then stop, and check the other end of the rat. Often when I open the feeding box to see how she’s progressing, she will strike at me, and then resume playing with her food.

After she finishes eating her rats, she is satisfied and very easy to handle.

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Dinnertime

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Owlet out of the nest in the morning

The owlets are starting to get out of the nest. Last night I was checked on the owls well after sunset. Daddy Owl was hooting way up at the top of a cottonwood above the owlets. Soon Mama Owl brought home the bacon in what looked like a gopher. She perched with Daddy Owl for a few minutes before she flew down and gave the owlets the gopher for dinner. The three-minute video below is edited down to two minutes forty-five seconds of owl video from Daddy Owl hooting to Big Baby Owl hopping back into the nest with dinner followed by 15 seconds of credits.

Being well past sunset, I could only see outlines of the owls with my bare eyes. I increased the exposure on the video by two stops which let me at least see when the edges of things looked sharp when I focused on the owls. I had to focus manually and hope for the best. Daddy and Mama Owl were backlit, so the increased exposure was able to get their details pretty well. Once Mama Owl flew down to the owlets, the background became dark. I didn’t increase the exposure further, because the picture probably would have become very pixilated in the darkness. As it is I got the video pretty well focused and you can see some details in the owlets in full-screen.

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Owlet out of the nest after sunset.