Today our dog was barking at something and we went to check it out. Sure enough, it was a snake. It looked like the Mohave Greens I’m used to seeing around here, but I’d never seen a coontail.
6/20/11 Diamondback without rattles — click for larger picture
It has no rattles!
We could SEE it rattling, but except for one very quiet rattle (or hissing, barely audible), we heard nothing.
At first I thought it was a mix between a King Snake and a Mohave Green (we recently heard that’s a problem in California), but a friend told me that it’s normal for rattlesnakes to lose the rattles and to have striped tails. Apparently both Diamondbacks and Mohave Greens have banded tails. A neighbor thinks it’s a Diamondback. We’ve had to kill 3 or 4 rattlers every year because they were by the house and none had bands like this one:
The banded tail with no rattles
You can’t HEAR this snake.
Usually I see rattlesnakes because they rattle. A lot more people will get bitten when they don’t hear the warning.
