I think I speak for many Houstonians this morning when I ask, "What the hell just happened?!"
Late yesterday, we had a classic unforecast major rain event. We were supposed to get a bit of rain, but nobody told Missouri City to expect eight inches of rain, and nobody told Pasadena to expect five inches. And what happens with this kind of unforecast event is many, many high-water rescues around Houston.
Things weren't as severe in the Clear Lake area, but we still got over two inches of rain in League City.
Some unfortunate folks were calling yesterday's event a "car floater" (this Chron link shows the inevitable submergence of cars on Highway 288 near the 610 exchange... how many more decades will it be before they fix that danged thing, anyway?!). But many Houstonians instead refer to those events as "toad floaters", although in certain circumstances, the term used may be somewhat less polite, a situation that could potentially be remedied via a management approach such as this one, which leads to the efficient removal of the offending material that has the potential to float.
Anyway, I prefer "toad floater" and so in honor of yesterday's surprise deluge, this post is dedicated to not a toad, but a related backyard amphibian.
Do you ever wonder what all those sounds are, those "creature noises" that emanate from your greater Houston / Galveston County back yard at night? Some of it might be originating with one or more of these guys:
An American green tree frog. This particular guy had taken shelter in one of my gardening buckets shortly before all hell broke loose, meteorologically-speaking. Maybe he used his frog senses to deduce that the rain was coming and was hoping the bucket would fill up for him.
These things are extremely shy and are much easier to hear than see. They're also nocturnal, so if you do encounter one by the light of day, it's most likely because you've accidentally uncovered its hiding place, as I did with this one above.
They are fantastic jumpers and often fling themselves with wild abandon only to unexpectedly hook some stationary object with one of their sticky feet, such that they come whipping around to rest upon it. That's what this guy did in jumping out of my bucket and latching onto this hose stand. Then he hunkered down like this and hoped I wouldn't take any further notice of him.
So there's some info on one suburban back yard resident that you might not have known you had, and I'll close by embedding a brief vid of the croaking that these guys produce (ignore the thunderstorm in the first few seconds, although that, too, is a propos of yesterday's weather in Houston):
The culmination of all my milkweed-growing and Monarch-watching becomes apparent in these special ten minutes. Happy Saturday - it's a glorious one.
Description from YouTube:
A Monarch is born during a spectacular sunny afternoon on April 20, 2013 in the Centerpointe neighborhood of League City, Texas.
The video frame position does not change, so you can see just how fast the wings expand. Rhythmic contractions of its abdomen are visible as fluid pumps from it to the wings. By the end of this 10-minute sequence, the wings extend beyond the lower edge of the field of view.
You've seen those T-shirts that say, "My mother went to Florida and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"?
Well, I went to the Interurban and all I got was this lousy picture of the Interurban.
I was using a long lens, which tended to amplify the impression of the high-towers. Looking north toward West Walker Street.
I was actually out looking for Comet PanSTAARS. Yes, I know that a person is not supposed to face north while looking for it, but I was bored with seeing nothing whatsoever on my western horizon save for the good people of Centerpointe whose McMansions were subtending at a very inconvenient five-ish degrees even when viewed from as far away as the Interurban.
It was inconvenient because PanSTAARS is very close to the horizon right now, so the houses may have been blocking it. But I've got a few more nights to try this gig, and when the "toenail moon" manifests, it might become easier to spot by virtue of the handy reference point.
I have to admit that, several years back when I first heard about the Butler Longhorn Museum, League City's very own museum devoted to cattle, my response was, "Do what?! They made an entire museum about what?!" I realized that Texas longhorns have a place in history, but a museum? I enjoy history, but so narrowly focussed?
And then the other bizarre part of our personal story with respect to it: despite having lived on Coryell Street during the house search that eventually led us to build in Centerpointe, we never saw the inside of the museum prior to yesterday.
Curiosity at 1220 Coryell Street: one of my own art shots from 2009, an eerie view of a museum shrouded in fog, a museum that mostly seemed to be shrouded in mystery. It wasn't open to the public in those years when we lived within spittin' distance of it. Or it was open for a time, but only for a few hours each week. Or nobody really knew if it was open or whether it would be open in the future. The whole thing was very complicated.
Even as of January 2013 on one of their webpages, it still says "the Museum is currently available by appointment for tours". In fact, that longer seems to be the case, as it's contradicted by another webpage from which the screengrab above was taken. They do seem to have regular public hours now. At least for the moment. But you should confirm this before you go.
But here's the bottom line on Butler: This place is so worth it. It's not just about cattle. It's about the history of Texas itself.
And it's about our local history. Believe it or not, we actually have a local history. Not just in the "Ye Olde Touriste Trappe" sense whereby a few lame facts are hyped for the purposes of drawing admission fees to some display. No. All this stuff is actually worth knowing about. It's interesting.
The cattle were merely the four-footed vehicle through which a big part of our unique history was realized.
There's a retail goods consumer outlet, and I forget which one, that used to have as their TV commercial slogan a statement along the lines of, "Once you go, you get it." Same idea applies to this museum.
Here's the ultimate endorsement for Butler Longhorn Museum: My teenager loved it. Really enjoyed our visit yesterday. This is the same kid who usually has to be disengaged from Facebook and Angry Birds using nothing short of a stick of dynamite.
These are just a couple of crappy cell phone pics that I'm adding to this post (I did look around first, and I saw no signs prohibiting crappy cell phone photography). My pics don't do the museum justice. The whole place is very artistic and creatively put together.
Life is short, and nonprofit institutions exist in a tenuous and often fleeting relationship with the balance of our socioeconomic reality. Go and see the Butler Longhorn Museum - you won't regret your admission fees. And keep your ear to the ground for special events that get scheduled there, because the current museum Director is reportedly trying to put an emphasis on that kind of value-added public involvement. The museum's online calendar is not necessarily being updated regularly, but there are often announcements in the local news media (plus the occasional bandit sign).
The scene on IH-610 NB just south of IH-10 about mid-afternoon today.
THE WOODLANDS?! OMG, THAT'S RIGHT NEXT DOOR!!
SEE?!?! PREDATORS - THEY ARE **EVERYWHERE**!!
YOU CAN'T BE TOO CAREFUL!!!
Well, yeah, "they" are everywhere, if it's crankheads we are referring to. According to published reports (not spoofing now), allegations of methamphetamine use compelled child welfare workers to attempt to remove a child from her mother's custody. The mother snatched her, the grandmother was implicated along the way, and the child was retrieved safely. It wasn't the boogey man come to snatch an innocent baby off a quiet suburban street - it was just another in an endless series of domestic dramas.
But along the way, those freeway bulletins reinforced unspecified boogey man terror in the hearts of perhaps one million Houstonians today. Seriously. I don't know how many motorists use the local freeways each day, but HCTRA alone reportedly handles a half-million. And I think that the Amber Alert system is a good system except it has this unfortunate drawback: these announcements don't provide any context as to what motorists are seeing. Many people see "kidnapped child" and they assume that it must be a pedophile who intends to leave the child's lifeless body on the train tracks after he gets done violating it repeatedly.
Sigh. Ilona Carson presented the statistic the other day that there are only about 100 abductions of kids by strangers nation-wide each year. Contrast that with this little gem:
Two hundred and four thousand, give or take. Versus one hundred. Children are almost exclusively snatched by family members, but that type of thing doesn't usually make a compelling news story, so we rarely receive that vital piece of perspective through the "regular" channels (pun intended). We mostly just get a distorted view and then we develop a distorted perspective to match it.
Two hundred to one odds, give or take, given the vagaries of any particular year's statistics. Remember that the next time a freeway marquee stops your beating heart.
A roving band of children cornered and seriously entertained a loose dog yesterday in the League City, Texas suburban neighborhood of Centerpointe.
It is suspected that the children were between six and nine years old.
Neither the dog nor the children were subject to any obvious control or supervision by hovering adults at the time of the incident.
The dog was rendered blissfully passive as she was alternately rubbed, scratched, and petted.
Witnesses report that the children and the dog also spent close to an hour engaging in games of chase and fetch within the public right of way, also without direct adult intervention, and without the dog being leashed. The children had no prior knowledge of the dog's training or temperament, but successfully negotiated the play interaction with the animal despite this limitation, as evidenced by their constant screams of delight. The witnesses refused to identify themselves for fear of social, legal, or regulatory reprisal.
It is believed that no similar incidence of spontaneous, unchoreographed play has occurred anywhere in League City since approximately 1984, prior to the time when stranger danger paranoia swept American society.
What prompted yesterday's bold demonstration of trust and affection is not known. However, greater Houston's primary English language commercial news network, local ABC affiliate KTRK-TV, recently distinguished itself by documenting the "free range" parenting movement and showcasing with actual statistics the degree to which "stranger danger" fears are unfounded, and follow-up reporting by independent sources emphasized these facts. It is possible that some local parenting attitudes are quietly evolving in the face of this compelling information.
Neither the children nor the dog were harmed during the event, although the dog's owners now wonder if her future expectations for affection will become a bit over-inflated.
A few thousand years ago, Greek mathematician Archimedes legendarily distinguished himself by running naked through the streets screaming something along the lines of, "Eureka! I found it!" following his bath-time realization that hydrostatic displacement could be used to determine the volume of an irregularly-shaped object such as a king's crown.
Fortunately for y'all, I did not proceed naked through the neighborhood, but the fact remains thatI found it: An unusual example of responsible journalism, and an uncommonly introspective one at that.
Let me explain in detail, because hell might freeze over before any of us have the privilege of seeing the likes of this again.
I raised a "free range" daughter, to the point where we were literally a local poster-family for the movement, widely known (and occasionally vilified) in our community, appearing briefly in a European TV documentary, and making other public appearances that I will not reference here.
For those of you who are not familiar with this child-rearing approach, it's difficult to capture all the nuances and underlying philosophies in one easy sound bite, but the underpinnings boil down to this:
Kids are a lot safer today than our pathologically-suspicious and histrionic American culture is publicly representing. And they're a lot more capable than we give them credit for. If we grant them the types of appropriate freedoms that we grew up with when we were children, they will develop stronger situational awareness and self-regulation skills than they would if we were to simply overparent them into a psychological no-man's land.
You've probably heard the term "helicopter parenting"? Free-range parenting is, in many respects, the antithesis of that. In my view, helicopter parenting is a subtle but gruesome form of child abuse because it communicates a wholesale lack of faith in the child's intrinsic capacity to mature. It instills groundless fears and literally erodes a child's ability to develop his or her own distinct identity.
Anyway, as I started to say, my child grew up free range in north Clear Lake. From the age of about seven onward, she was allowed to go outdoors, meet up with a few friends who were also granted the same limited but logical freedoms, and explore our neighborhood without any adult hovering over her head in a state of sub-panicked paranoia. And for several years, that's just what she did with her free time - she would leave our home with her friends on a weekend morning, and then re-appear perhaps six hours later, all smiles and sparkling eyes, to tell me about their collective adventures.
I watched that small group of kids flourish in the face of these basic freedoms. From afar, I saw them develop fantastic cooperation skills, such as subtle but highly-sophisticated intra-group communication protocols to warn of approaching cars as they were riding bikes and playing ball games in the streets. They climbed trees unassisted. The built a secret fort in the shrubbery behind one of the Pineloch neighborhood monument signs, a bower into which they would retreat for hours at a time. They knew every squeezable hole in every fence within a half mile of our house. Even if the Boogey Man had attempted to pursue them at any point, he wouldn't have had a chance. They had mentally mapped their surroundings so thoroughly that they would have simply slipped away, vanished like four-foot phantoms, as the masters of their suburban environment that they had literally become.
My daughter, now a teenager in high school and beginning to feel the inevitable performance pressures of impending adulthood, looks back upon that time with pure reverence. "Those were the best years of my life," she often says, with a twinge of sadness in her voice, mourning their passage.
I can't imagine what either of our lives would be like today had we not lived that way when she was young. What's the point of living if there's no available access to life's everyday moments of pure magic? How does a child go on to explore and relish the wider world and successfully face adult challenges if they start from way, way behind the existential eight-ball, cement-shoed with the type of abject fears and suspicious world views that are transmitted to them through helicopter parenting? I don't know the answer. I do know that, even as we were free-ranging, I was seeing some other children - a mere seven or eight years old - already beginning to take psychoactive medication to manage their anxiety and depression. It's easy for me to understand why they were succumbing to those afflictions at such tender ages.
Anyway, the great gift that KTRK gave us all yesterday was to shine a CG spotlight on the extent to which many helicopter-style fears are actually groundless. Free-rangers have known this all along, of course, but in the chronically-sensationalist commercial news media, that part of the message is almost always sacrificed on the altar of "bad parenting" rhetoric and "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality.
KTRK reporter Ilona Carson showcased quantitatively the relative risks posed by the "stranger danger" hysteria that is usually the excuse parents give for hovering and prohibiting unsupervised play.
An American child's odds of dying in a car wreck are TWENTY TIMES HIGHER than their odds of being abducted by a stranger. And yet which of those two possibilities dominates every child autonomy decision made by many parents? The snatching scenario.
This is obviously a disturbingly-poor risk assessment that many parents make, yet it's not difficult to understand what drives their mistaken priorities. We are constantly surrounded by over-hyped media presentations of those few children who do become victims of this incredibly-rare type of crime (even when they are not really).
But here's where KTRK's production progressed from important to revolutionary: They actually shone the spotlight squarely on their own contribution to the problem by referring back to their coverage of a recent Houston abduction - the type of story that may work well where subscriber ratings and advertisement revenues are concerned, but which arguably does a disservice to our society by helping to distort public perception of the associated risks. That took real guts.
This wider risk prioritization issue, by the way, is also why I am so strident on certain public service priorities such as traffic enforcement, sidewalk availability and sidewalk maintenance. There are risks posed to young children who are playing and exploring outdoors with a minimum of direct adult supervision, but they are not the risks that most parents assume. The primary risk derives from the auto-pedestrian threat. THAT is what we should be working to ameliorate, not the much-lower risks associated with imaginary Boogey Men.
Anyway, thanks for slogging through my usual long-winded preamble. When I immigrated to Houston many years ago, the first words I heard uttered were, "Say it out loud! I'm Houston proud!" I was never Houston-prouder than I was yesterday when I saw this news segment, and I give my heartfelt thanks to both Ilona and Lenore. Enjoy the 3.5-minute show.
I've been doing one heck of a lot of long-winded grumbling lately about bad pedestrian conditions, so here's a great opportunity to counterbalance all that by posting about one little opportunity in our society that WAS created with pedestrians in mind. And kids. And pets.
The weather is forecast to be spectacular, and the UHCL campus is beautiful. Consider it!! A walk outdoors not far from here in beautiful weather and it's to raise money for a wonderful cause.
When I let our dog out to pee last night, I heard the strangest chorus emanating from the pond at the intersection of Centerpointe Drive and West Walker. It was so distinctive that my husband and I decided to bail out of the house for a walk at 10:00 p.m. to investigate further. This is what we recorded:
Here's what one of these little amphibious dudes looks and sounds like up close:
I've heard various species of frogs dominating the retention chorus at various times over the past two years, but I've never heard this one before now.
It sure was a pain to track him down. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) maintains a call database of frogs that are found in Texas:
There are a lot of different species of frogs found in Texas:
Holy cow!
I went alphabetically, so I basically sat here and spooled up the sounds of about 43 different species before I hit upon what appears to be the correct one: the Southern Leopard Frog.
It's amazing to me that they can so obviously flourish in what were designed to be (and which usually become) dry-bottom retention ponds. But it's been a good year for rain, and rain is what frogs need to thrive.
Screengrab from the site for MD6282, which is the weather station operating from inside Centerpointe. According to this site, we've received 49.78 inches of rain so far in 2012, and we still have one quarter of the year to go. Contrast that with the 31.08 inches we received in all of 2011, which was the Year from Hell.
Remember this post from about two weeks ago when I published the world's crappiest camera phone pic of a Great Horned Owl that was perched on a utility tower in the Interurban easement?
Clearly not one of my better artistic achievements.
Well, check this out - I'm now following that up with some equally-crappy video that I shot last night up by the same easement. This is only ten seconds long, but you'll probably have to turn up your computer's volume to hear the interesting sound it contains:
In case you'd like to see what these magnificent creatures look like and sound like up close, here for comparison is somebody else's non-crappy short video showing one in captivity (turn the volume on your computer back down before hitting 'play'!).
As near as we could tell from the sound, there were two of them hanging around the east side of Centerpointe last night. They started out in the Interurban easement around 8:00 p.m. with their hooting, but then an hour or so later, one of them moved into the large pine tree at the corner of Centerpointe Drive and West Walker. After walking the dog, I hung around in our back yard for a few minutes just to hear a bit more of what they had to say.
So listen for their haunting calls the next time you find yourself walking along West Walker or the eastern section of Centerpointe Drive. I have no idea what prompted all this hooting last night, given that I had not heard them on previous recent walks, but they were literally calling out every thirty seconds. If cars are flying by on West Walker, the sound will be obscured by the noise, but when a gap in traffic comes, you might be able to hear them coming through loud and clear in all their mysterious feathered glory.
Well, I'm an empty-nester, at least in the literal sense of it.
Scene looking out through two slats in the window blinds. The bigger squab was the one to launch first. In the way of many birds, he (or she) actually sat on the back of this chair for quite some time getting his bearings in his (or her) first trip out of the nest.
The smaller squab left the nest about an hour later, perching on top of a wind chime until getting his (or her) bearings.
They actually both returned to the nest last night, after spending their afternoon in the great outdoors. According to Wiki, their father (not their mother) will continue to feed them for up to two weeks now that they have fledged (both parents participate in raising them - I didn't know that until looking it up just now).
Meanwhile, it's time for me to give that bedraggled hanging plant some much-needed water.
:-)
Between our yard and our next-door neighbors' yard, there is a discrete trail of feathers suggesting that the entire bird was methodically stripped before being consumed.
Fortunately this victim of Nature was not the mother of our twin fledglings, and she's still feeding them. Any day now, they'll fly the nest.
And (drumroll, please!) here they are in their almost-fledged glory, looking like feathered versions of Yin and Yang with one eyeball apiece showing - the babies!
:-)
Yes, it was taken with a telephoto so as not to disturb them.
That is one useful hanging basket. This year I put asparagus fern there, which the Mama seemed to like better than the last thing I chose, which was a broad leafed plant that didn't provide as much camoflage.
Anyway, I'm glad I managed to snag that photo op, because it won't be but a few more days before those flight feathers finish coming in, and off they'll go to take their places in this world.
Very striking configuration lighting up the western sky this evening:
Sort of like a backwards cosmic "L" framed by those wax myrtles I mentioned two days ago.
Checking with Earthsky reveals that this represents the following alignment:
http://earthsky.org/tonight
The site headline for March 25 read, "Moon and Jupiter closest in west after sunset"
Anyway, I'd say this enchanting alignment represents a very fitting end to a spectacular weekend, weather-wise. In the spring and fall, Houston's weather can't be beat!
:-)
Before departing our humble abode, one or more of last month's monarch visitors laid eggs. This is one of the reasons why I like to have abundant landscaping in my yard: it's not just nice to look at in a passive sense - all kinds of interesting stuff happens out there. It's an entire story unfolding on a daily basis in a ridiculously-small suburban back yard and, of one gets off one's duff and actively starts looking around, a lot of that unfolding story becomes evident, and there's plenty of learning opportunity in it. I didn't know that monarchs actually bred and reproduced this far south. I thought they proceeded farther north on their annual migrations before doing that.
I seemed to have had far more caterpillars than milkweed available to feed them, because they stripped the plant bare. That raised the obvious question: should I have culled the herd, leaving more milkweed available to a smaller number of individuals, or should I have let nature take its course?? Knowing very little about the life cycle of monarchs, I decided on the latter.
As the milkweed plants were getting stripped bare (they'll grow back from the roots), and the caterpillars began abandoning the urn of milkweed, presumably looking for more of it elsewhere.
"Is there any good way down from this thing?!?!"
This guy got one of the last available leaves.
And this guy decided to eat his last leaf upside down.
Notice how this guy had a larger yellow head and some larger sucker feet than the other individuals. I don't know why this is. Was he a different sub-species, did these differences represent the beginning stages of metamorphosis, or did this represent something else entirely?
As of this morning, all of the caterpillars have vacated the now-stripped milkweed and have gone about their mysterious ways in doing whatever comes next for them. I don't know if any of them got enough nutrition to make it through their chrysalis stage. I was kinda hoping to see a few cocoons hanging around our yard because they're really neat...
www.wikipedia.org
...and then toward the end of the metamorphosis, you start seeing the butterfly forming within.
So perhaps if I get lucky, I'll find a coccoon or two somewhere in our yard in the next week or two (how far can caterpillars travel from a host plant before they have to hunker down for their change of life??). And within a few more months, hopefully I'll have more milkweed.
I haven't lived in Centerpointe long enough to know whether the unusual concentration of large birds in this area is "normal", or is partially a result of the drought forcing many species including avian predators into suburban areas to search for food, as some recent news articles have suggested.
What I DO know is that the number and diversity of birds is remarkable. Part of this is certainly due to the relatively large amount of undeveloped green space in our area:
Nearby open fields marked with arrows. It may not look like much on a map, but relative to other Clear Lake areas, it's a lot of open land in a relative sense.
Drive south on West Walker on any morning and you are absolutely guaranteed to see at least two towering raptors (birds of prey) perched on light posts between here and Victory Lakes. This morning, there were three.
About two days ago, I saw something I've never seen before: I'm about 75% sure I saw a bald eagle flying over Clear Creek at IH-45. It was simply too large to be any other bird of prey.
And this morning again, another new sighting: a Sandhill Crane in one of the fields on the east side of West Walker just north of Victory Lakes Intermediate School. Sandhills winter in Texas and are not uncommon, but this is the first time I've ever seen one in a suburban neighborhood.
From http://www.wikipedia.org/, which is no longer blacked out today because of the SOPA/PIPA controversy.
Sandhills are simultaneously well-camoflaged by their muddy greyish color, but hard to miss because of their four-foot-tall stance.
(Updated September 4, 2013) There was a story in the Galveston County Daily News two days ago titled "Snakes Turning Up in the Suburbs" about a snake discovery in League City, and the ensuing debate as to the species of the critter.
I thought I would follow up with some additional info regarding our local snake population. World's biggest disclaimer: These are personal anecdotes and observations only. I'm not an expert on snake behavior; I'm just an avid outdoorswoman who has lived in our area for many years. Snakes are like many other critters: even if certain behaviors are common species-wide, individual members of the species can behave very differently than the population average. Don't assume that the general characteristics described here will be true in every case.
First I'd like to say - welcome to the subtropical upper Texas coast!! Snakes and other reptiles are a part of daily lives around here, and are often found in the suburbs. They are around us whether or not we actually see them. (Remember the posts I did about the red-tailed hawks and the Swainson's hawk? What do you suppose those guys are eating?).
Second, here's a run-down of some of the more noteworthy local species:
(1) Water Moccasin. It's easy to see how this venomous snake got its alternate name, which is "cottonmouth":
This open-mouth behavior is the snake's analog of a middle-finger gesture. Moccasins typically do not back down or make any attempt to avoid human contact, and that's what makes them dangerous. They would often rather sit in a human's travel path and fight than slither away before the human gets too close.
This pic was taken on my family's farm which is some distance from Houston, but this snake is also extremely common in our area:
This pic was taken on the lawn of Sylvan Rodriguez Park on the north side of Clear Lake. You can see he has not yet opened his mouth, but he has assumed the characteristic strike position. Once again, the moccasin holds its ground despite the size of the adversary, which was me.
It can be almost impossible to tell the difference between moccasins and nonvenomous water snakes (described below), because of natural variations in age, color, and shape. Sometimes I make the call solely on the basis of behavior:
the more aggressive it is,
the more likely it's a moccasin.
I was riding my bicycle when I encountered that particular snake, so I had almost no equipment with me. However, I did not want to simply leave the snake basking on the lawn with so many small children playing in Rodriguez Park. Therefore, I took the one long-ish item I had with me, which was the bungee cord holding a Kryptonite lock on the frame of my bike, and started whacking the snake with it, to encourage him to move back into the woods. No dice - all that did was make him even more PO'd at me. This is an example of just how assertive these guys can be.
(2) Copperhead. Also venomous, the easily-identified copperheads can be as dumb as moccasins are assertive. The copperheads I have seen have not been aggressive and really don't seem to want to interact with humans, but at the same time, they don't have the common sense to get the heck out of the way.
I took this pic in nearby Fort Bend County, but I've also seen these in abundance in places like Armand Bayou Nature Center. In the encounter shown above, the snake seemed thoroughly intimidated, but still it would not turn and flee into the abundant vegetative cover, as many nonvenomous snakes would have done.
(3) Coral snake. This is one of the most acutely-toxic animals on earth, and a well-placed bite is fatal. The good news is that their mouths are so small that it's almost impossible for them to set a good bite on a human; a recent Houston Chronicle story reports that only one human death has been attributed to coral snakes in the past 40 years. It is extremely rare to see a coral snake, and I've only seen one in the 20-odd years I've lived in Texas. I don't have a photo of that one because it quickly turned and fled, but here's a stock drawing:
Note: Rattlesnakes don't always make that stereotypical chica-chica-chica rattle like you hear on TV shows. Sometimes the sound they make is more like a loud uniform buzz. If you are outdoors and hear a prolonged buzz that does not quite sound like a cicada, it might not be a cicada!
There were many amusing sights on Galveston Island during the clean-up following Hurricane Ike in 2008. In this case, someone decided to include a rattlesnake carcass with a pile of household hazardous waste!
(5) Nonpoisonous species. There are many, and it can be extremely difficult to tell the difference between venomous and nonvenomous. The rule is, you do not ever handle a snake unless you are willing to bet your life on it being nonvenomous.
Chicken snakes are as docile as they are harmless. They can be surprisingly large - this one is coiled around my arm here so it's length is difficult to perceive, but it was about six feet long. You can see that the head is not viper-shaped and the pupil of the eye is round rather than slit-shaped - both of these are characteristics of nonvenomous snakes.
Kids are often fascinated by snakes. Last year during Armand Bayou Nature Center's "Bayou Boil" fundraiser, the staff brought along a few nonvenomous snakes for folks to see and touch.
Water snakes are also nonvenomous and mostly want to run away when they see humans. This crazy-cropped pic was taken in League City's Heritage Park, an excellent location for seeing local wildlife of all types (and for launching kayaks, which is why I'm wearing an inflatable PFD here). Two young boys had spotted this water snake on the shore of the park's pond. You can see that I put on surgical gloves here before picking it up, and that's because we noticed that it was letharic. Zoonotic diseases are a potential concern when handling wildlife. It turned out that this guy was likely not diseased, but he did prove to be injured. I had to cut him loose from discarded fishing line, which is a terrible menace to wild animals of many types.
Of course, snakes are not the only reptiles that inhabit our area!! Some of you may remember this locally-famous alligator, who took up residence in 2007 under one of the bridges in the tony Bay Oaks subdivision of north Clear Lake:
It's a crummy cell phone pic but trust me -
she was a BIG Mamma!!!
People can be rather passionate about wildlife around here, as some of the signs posted on the bridge above Big Mamma Alligator attested:
So there you have some scoop on a bit of local slither - happy recreating!
:-)
20130904: And as one final note, here is a useful infographic summarizing the same type of information presented above. This continues to be a high-traffic post so I thought I'd add that.
