THE SNAKE-WHISPERER

One of those blustery days in May on the Colorado Front Range – we set off early in the morning, anticipating thunderstorms by mid-afternoon.  The dirt road to the prairie trailhead was in fine shape – a smooth, wide ribbon of red gravel and clay wrapping its way through grassland and brush.   No vehicles but ours that morning, a Wednesday.  Good day to hike.  

The Soapstone Prairie Natural Area north of Fort Collins, Colorado, was once old stomping-grounds for me.  Fifty years ago, fresh out of college at nearby Colorado State, I worked on a farm north of town and spent as many hours and days as I could trespassing on the huge ranchlands that stretched all the way up into Wyoming.  One of those ranches, which covered nearly all of the massive Rawhide Basin, contained the famous Lindenmeier archaeological site where a group of paleontologists in the 1930's uncovered a world-shaking  trove of Folsom Man remains.  In 2004, the City of Fort Collins purchased the 19,000-acre ranch for its magnificent conservation values and converted it into a public park – renamed the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area.  Today, forty-four miles of trails stretch across the brushy uplands on the north end of the property, while most of the acreage has been dedicated to wildlife protection.  Bison have been reintroduced, along with the endangered black-footed ferret; on the cliffs and slopes contained within the Prairie, raptors still nest and hunt the open grasslands.  

On that May morning of our visit, Dorothy and I planned a six-mile hike, using the helpful printed Prairie map as our guide.  We would make a nice loop on trails named Mahogany, Towhee, and Canyon – and our plan was to spend all morning, into early afternoon, walking slowly enough to spot birds along the way.  Green and rufous-sided towhees, brown thrashers, meadowlarks, phoebes, and several species of flycatcher promised copious use of our binoculars. We had just purchased a new pair for Dorothy; this would be her honeymoon with them.

Most trails in Soapstone wind their way up steep, brushy slopes at the north end of the preserve.  A series of gulches cut their way down to the flatter grassland below, so the trails, as they climb toward the ridgetop to the north, have a rolling quality – gulch, to the nose of a slope, and then across the next gulch.  All the while, you’re surrounded by brushy, thick mountain mahogany, the dominant shrub of the Colorado foothills and a plant of major importance to nesting birds and browsing herbivores.  The Prairie managers close the area to human use from late fall to mid-March to give mule deer, pronghorn, and elk the chance to use the rich winter range.  As you hike, you carry the constant sense of large, furry animals about, even if you don’t see any.  Plenty of sign there that wild critters also use the trails – deer and elk pellets all around.

We kept a close eye on the weather all morning as we worked our way along the bends of the trail.  The day was heating up and the clouds grew more active, arriving now in big, grey trains from the north.  We were nowhere near being able to see over the high ridge – into the stretched belly of southern Wyoming where the cloud factory seemed to lie.  As a kid, I was once knocked unconscious by lightning, and I possess a morbid fear of it.  These massive rolling grasslands of north-central Colorado are renowned for hail, wind, and driving rain – and the exhilarating threat of skyborne electrical bolts zipping thru the air.  As the clouds and heat continued to rise, I kept stopping to peruse the map, wondering if we might be wise to veer off somewhere and take a quicker route back to the car.  Though she does not share my fear of thunderstorms, Dorothy could easily sense my apprehension.  

“No harm in a shorter hike,” she said at one point. “How much shorter might it be?”  

I realized at that moment on the trail, we could backtrack just a few hundred yards to a junction we had passed.  It was the start of what looked like a spur trail connecting the Mahogany Loop with the Towhee, and a somewhat quicker way to get back to the check-in station.  Either way we went, we would top out on the crest of the ridge – and from there, we’d get a better sense of the weather moving our way.  So we backtracked and took a steeper trail north.  A light rain began to fall, driven by rising gusts of wind.  I kept listening for the birds to fall silent – one good sign that violent weather may hit soon.

In a half-hour’s hike we reached the ridgetop and the pleasing realization that the storm was passing with nothing stacked behind it.  Friendly white clouds to the north, but mostly blue sky.  We stopped atop the flat-rock ridge to eat sandwiches and take in the view below – miles of pale green shortgrass prairie dotted with red-rimmed ponds for the animals; the Mummy Range still white with snow on the far horizon.  My lightning-stabbed heart went quiet again as I chewed my lunch slowly and sipped water from my trail bottle.  

A flash of color suddenly caught our eye along the northward-arcing path.  A lone mountain biker churning his way along the rolling slope, maybe 300 yards away.  He was the only person we’d seen since our start.  It looked from the map that he had be over on the Plover Trail, the long, arcing route along the north edge of the preserve.  If I had my bearings right, he’d eventually connect to the trail we were on, maybe a half mile west.  We set off again, grateful for good salami and clearing weather.  

I tapped my hiking poles rhythmically as I walked the narrow trail ahead of Dorothy.  We were on a nice flat stretch atop the long ridge.  The brush cleared away to nothing but a series of thick patches in the shallow draws, and the trail now rolled though short turf – blue grama and buffalograss mostly, with some patches of prickly pear to hold your attention.  The metal tips of my sticks clinked against stone here and there, but it was mostly a silent hike – just the soft crunch of boots on fine gravel.  I kept looking out for the mountain biker, in that nameless space of a hiker’s mind, idling amid motion and easy exertion.  No sign of him, though.

Where the path turned west, we came over a low rise, and just ahead I saw something strange alongside the track.  It was an animal on the ground – buff-colored and still, and from this distance, maybe thirty yards, about the size of a jackrabbit.  But as we grew closer, a clearer identity emerged.  It was a bird, a big one, lying on its side, not eight inches off trail’s edge.  I stopped and turned so Dorothy could see it past my shoulder.  

“What...?” she muttered.

“It’s a hawk,” I said.  “Some kind of hawk.”

“Dead?”  

“I don’t know.  Sure looks dead.”

The bird lay still as we approached.  It seemed a perfect mystery – a broad-winged soaring bird somehow struck dead from the sky?  We could see the sleekness and sheen on one wing, which lay flat against the upside of the fallen body.  This bird had not been on the ground for long.  We walked at a crawl, marveling at the sudden surprise, not knowing but trying to imagine what had happened here.  I soon realized that we were looking at a ferruginous hawk, next to the golden eagle, the largest of the soaring birds on these plains.  They are distinctively light in color – white breast and throat but wings tinged with the rusty-iron hue that gives them the name “ferruginous.”  Their legs are feathered all the way to the toes, like the golden eagle, lending them a distinctive “booted” appearance.  I had not seen one in many years, though they were among the commonest hawks I watched when I lived near here in the mid-1970s.  I loved their remarkable aggressiveness.  

Thinking it respectful to find a more private resting place for this regal bird, I approached it slowly, about to use a walking stick to tap it lightly and confirm its death.  But as I lifted my stick for the touch, I caught a strange movement beneath the bird’s wing.  We watched with amazement as the slinky form of an iridescent green-gold snake slowly appeared from the wraps of the bird’s body.  We both jumped about six feet, landing with the astonishment of what had happened here – or what seemed to have happened.

“That’s a prairie rattlesnake,” I said to Dorothy – and somehow, suddenly, the Latinate name for the animal popped into my head and past my lips.  “Crotalus viridus,” I said.  This one looked distinctively green in the cloud-filtered light – and that is what moved me to the species-name, viridus, a form of the Latin word for green.   Dorothy is used to my frequent flights of verbal fancy, so she said nothing mocking or bemused.  Moreover, she, too, had seen the warning posters down in the parking lot: Beware of Snakes! and a clear photograph of the dreaded, dangerous Crotalus viridus.  

“OK, here’s what happened,” I said, as if I knew.  “These hawks are big and fearless, and they will kill rattlers.  This hawk was soaring, saw that snake out here on open ground, went in for the kill . . .”

“. . . and the snake surprised it,” she said, finishing my thought. 

“Yes!  The snake maybe saw the shadow or something, and made a strike just as the hawk hit it.  This bird died from snakebite.”

“So why is the snake still here?” she wondered. 

“I have no idea,” I said.  

But soon I did.

The snake by now had taken keen notice of us and had lifted its head in our direction, maybe eight feet away, flicking the air with its tongue as its body ever so slowly began to stretch toward us.  We could see it was a big thing, inches thick and god knew how long.  Five feet maybe? As the snake moved slowly in our direction, I saw the hawk’s eye flick open, its yellow-brown iris gazing toward the sky.  But only for an instant.

“That bird is alive,” I said.

“It is not.”

“It is.  I just saw the eye open.”

“It isn’t open,” Dorothy said, maybe with a tinge of fear.

“Well, it opened.  That bird is alive.”

And then we realized: the snake was actually wrapped all the way around it – around the upper body, mostly, several times, with a good strong twist around the neck.  It occurred to me that if we could coax the snake into uncoiling, something interesting might happen.  Like . . . how alive was this bird, really?  How could it be possible that a rattler-bit bird remained vital?  Were we witnessing the very last moments of its life?  

The snake was all menace now, glaring and flicking and moving its head in a series of slow, sideways glides.  I was listening carefully for the rattle but heard nothing, assuming the tail lay trapped beneath the bird.

Using one walking stick, I prodded toward the snake’s head, hoping to make it strike.  Dorothy, meanwhile, had pulled out her phone to video this insane enterprise of mine.  

“Uh . . .  how far can they strike?” she asked.  

“No more than the length of the body, but this guy is all wrapped up in his work.” 

All the while, I kept thinking of the guy on the bike – kept thinking he was behind us on the trail.  And at the speed he was moving, coming over that low ridge in this direction, he would never see the bird-snake melange in time to stop or swerve.  I assumed the snake could bite him.  All the more reason, I thought, to get this death-drama somehow moving away from the trail.  

The scene went on for some time – me approaching with the pole tip tapping the ground, snake slowly bobbing and weaving in a deadly, mesmerizing dance, head held high in the air, eyes aflame with what I took to be cold rage.  Hawk body inert, lifeless, burying most of the snake’s length in feathers.  In the middle of my intervening, I thought to tap the bird once to see if the eye might open again.  When I did, the amber eye flashed awake, and this time the hawk raised and lowered its wing in a motion that seemed agonized to me.  I felt I could sense the last of its life ebbing away.

The snake did not strike my pole tip but now began to move more quickly, getting closer to me inch by inch.  I realized that this was possible only if the snake were uncoiling, but I could see little of its long body beneath the feathers.  I looked to the bird’s neck just in time to realize that the last coil of the snake had come undone, and in the instant the bird felt free, it leapt into the air and flew!  Four fast wingbeats, and it was gone over the ridge.  

The snake escaped, too, but we were too astounded to see.  When the bird jumped, we jumped, both of us screaming with shock.  The snake made haste and was gone before our wits returned. 

A bit of calm slowly came back.

“I guess the bike guy is safe now,” I said.

“Yeah,” Dorothy replied.  “Are we?”  

“Messing with the wiles of nature and all...” I said.  

“Yes, dear.  You are some kind of snake-whisperer.”

“How you make me blush.”

We set off again and soon reached a junction with the Towhee Loop, the trail that would lead us back to the car.  That’s when we realized that our little shortcut was the thing that allowed us access to the snake-hawk drama.  Had we remained on our original course, we’d have reached this same junction, but from a loop running farther north.  We’d have bypassed the segment of trail where the hawk tried its best to nail a rattler.  Strange to think that a fear I had carried since age eight was the thing that led us to that moment of grace. 

* * * *

Something about that rattlesnake did not sit right with me, and so, hours later, back at our motel in Fort Collins, I started looking into it.  How could it be that a poisoned bird would fly off so suddenly and with such strength?  Why would a rattlesnake hang around after successfully bringing down a winged predator?  I suddenly remembered the bull snake, a reptile that much resembles the prairie rattler, and realized in the same moment that I knew little about them, even though I had come across many of them on the farm.  Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, his 1968 nonfiction classic, makes great literary work of a bull snake he encountered near the Park Service housetrailer he lived in during his season at Arches National Monument.  Abbey claimed to have befriended a local bull snake, bringing it to his domicile to catch mice and menace the midget faded rattler he had recently seen on the trailer step.  But Abbey, not the best naturalist who ever tried his hand at nature-writing, got things mostly wrong.  “The gopher snake,” he wrote, “Drymarchon corais couperi, or bull snake, has a reputation as the enemy of rattlesnakes, destroying or driving them away whenever encountered.”  In the first place, the snake he identifies with the Latinate Drymarchon corais couperi is actually the Eastern indigo snake, not found in the West.  It’s not related to bull snakes.  Secondly, the idea that bull snakes and rattlers are mortal enemies is false.  Bull snakes do not typically eat or drive away rattlers, but they do mimic them.  Bull snakes both look and behave a lot like the prairie rattler; when threatened, they coil and act as if ready to strike, but they are non-venomous and possess no horny maracas at the tip of the tail.  Their mimicking the fatally dangerous rattler is a kind of behavioral crypsis, a clever defense mechanism to ward off predators.  They kill their larger prey mostly by constricting, holding tight while the life ebbs out of the unfortunate critter, often a ground squirrel, or gopher.  

That behavior would explain what we witnessed on the trail.   We had the scene half-right: the ferruginous hawk did indeed try to nab that bull snake, but somehow the reptile sensed the attack and turned the tables, wrapping itself around the body and neck of the fallen bird.  We were perhaps moments away from the death of the hawk – but by suffocation, not venom.  We may have arrived just in time.  

The dry-witted Dorothy summed up the event up from the hawk’s point of view – released by accidental hiker intervention, and left to fight another day, the normally masterful hawk said, “Well, that was embarrassing.”

* * * * 

But wait.

            Was that bird a ferruginous hawk? 

            Months following our encounter with the snake-wrapped raptor, I sent the video to our web designer, Thomas Meinzen, who is, among other things, a masterful naturalist and ecologist. I asked him to post it here, and he did so after a keen look at the action Dorothy recorded with her phone.  Thomas delicately let me know that the bird I had taken to be a ferruginous hawk was actually a juvenile redtail, its ineptitude as predator-on-training-wings one indication of its identity. The better indications lie in the field marks, visible in the video.  I simply missed them, live and on camera. 

            I don’t feel that I owe Ed Abbey an apology, but perhaps a confession: I am no better naturalist.

            “Well, that was embarrassing.”