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CALIFORNIA & ARIZONA
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March 2001
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 3 of 5 
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DESERT
Well, our first few days in the desert were nearly devoid
of all reptile life. Saw some lizards
at a distance, that’s about it. We had
arrived a week too early, still too cold for cold-blooded critters to be
moving. Our consolation was arriving
right on time for the desert in bloom, stunning pin cushions of color
scattered on the sandy dunes.
Anzo-Borrego Desert State Park
After
a day at Anzo-Borrego we continued east towards Arizona.
Just outside Yuma
we explored sand dunes that rolled down to the Mexican border, pretty much
barren except for sparse creosote bushes that held their own and shored up
the rodent holes that tunneled beneath their roots.
Ron
and I split up and eventually lost sight of each other behind the sandy
ridges. After half an hour of seeing
nothing I concluded it was simply too cool for reptiles and decided to give
up wandering until it got warmer. I laid down on the soft sand, closed my eyes, and soaked up
the sun while settling in for a nap.
It was all quite peaceful, except for the military jets practicing
take-offs directly overhead and the gunfire from a nearby riflery range.
What
eventually interfered with my sleep, however, was a barely audible noise that
sounded disturbingly like a voice. It
had the distant rise and fall of two syllables, like someone far away calling
for their dog. It gradually dawned on
me that those two syllables might be “Ei-tan!” and I made a point of
listening more closely. Could be, but
hard to tell, so I got up and began walking in the direction of the tiny
sound. As I approached it became
louder and clearer, and now I could distinctly hear my name. I answered with a single syllable “Ron!”
and kept moving towards him until up over a ridge came the waving figure of
my brother. When he finally saw me his
cry changed to a different set of syllables — “Cer-as-tes!!” — and I started running as fast as I could through the
sinking sand. I couldn’t believe it,
he had found a Sidewinder!
Seems
that while I was dozing Ron was systematically searching the base of every creosote he passed looking for anything that
might have surfaced as the morning air began to warm. Somehow among all those random bushes he
managed to spot the curved lines of a snake coiled in the shadows. It’s great to find herps when road
cruising or flipping artificial cover, but somehow nothing compares to
finding a snake in its natural habitat, giving a glimpse of how it lives at
home. This is what we had come for, to find an iconic western species we’d known from
countless desert documentaries but had never seen in the wild. Didn’t matter now how cold it was and how
few reptiles we might find, this moment alone was well worth the trip.
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Colorado Desert Sidewinder
Crotolus cerastes laterorepens
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