S3E22: Debunking Snake Misconceptions

[UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT]

0:00:00 - (Chris): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out 90milesfromneedles.com/donate or text the word "needles" to 53555.

0:00:24 - (Joe Geoffrey):Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:43 - (Chris): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to yet another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. And we are not in the studio today because it's about 195 degrees in the studio.

0:00:55 - (Chris): We are in the slightly more echoey living room of my house with Lucas Basulto, who is, aside from being a co worker of mine when I was at NPCA, is the president of the board of directors of the Desert Advocacy Media Network. So he is technically now my boss. But I'm not asking him here to suck up. I am asking him here because we recently celebrated World Snake Day on the 16th. That was the 16th, I think.

0:01:20 - (Luke):I believe so, yep.

0:01:24 - (Chris): And so Luke, like many presidents of nonprofit boards, is part snake and just knows a lot about them, appreciates them like very few people are able to do, though they're certainly getting more popular and less reviled. I will just launch off the discussion here by relating a story that happened when I was maybe three years old and my mom was doing something in the kitchen, and we had one of those kitchen sinks with a window that looked out onto the front yard. And I was in the front yard and I was running over towards a rock by the driveway.

0:02:03 - (Chris): I don't remember this. So I'm going by what my parents said, but there were a pair of some kind of garter snakes sunning on a boulder. And I was running towards them yelling, kitty, kitty, kitty. And my mother, who is snake phobic even today, screamed, dropped what she was doing, ran out, grabbed me, ran back inside, locked the doors, pulled the blinds. And so I managed to learn a little bit of that reflexive flinch that you get when you're a kid and grown ups tell you, ah, dangerous.

0:02:41 - (Chris): But the affection never went away. So I'm definitely, definitely a big snake fan. I was very happy to see you a gopher snake in our garage recently.

0:02:49 - (Luke): Yeah, snake stories like that, they're everywhere, right? You either have a really good experience with a snake early on, a really scary, startling experience that shapes the way you look at the animals for at least a stretch of your life until you learn otherwise. Somewhere down the road, I don't have a first snake memory. There was never this moment where I was like, oh, a snake. They were just always there.

0:03:15 - (Luke): My parents both had snakes before I was born, they had a big python, like, big burmese python or something. So I was born. There hasn't been a moment in my life.

0:03:25 - (Chris): You were basically food.

0:03:26 - (Luke): Yeah, that's why they got rid of it, I think. But being a new parent myself, I could see why you wouldn't want a massive snake in the house that has to eat large rabbits or something like that. The snake ended up going through the zoo system, and it is at some zoo out there somewhere still, but, yeah, I don't have that moment of, like, of realization with snakes, because I think they've just always been a part of my life, and I think that's unique. There was a time in my life where I took an interest in them and wanted to learn more about them for myself, but it was just because they were always there, and I wanted to know about this thing that was always around me. It's just learning about paint on the walls or something like that. I'm just looking at paint because your living room is a really pretty color, but it's just something that's always there, and you wonder why it is.

0:04:11 - (Luke): And that's my experience with learning about snakes. I was that kid that took snakes that I found either in our yard or out in the desert. I took them to school in, like, my backpack. Like, I would have them, like, through, like, from elementary school through high school either. For some reason, there was never, like, a really solid reason for it. I didn't want to show people, like, I never took it out and was like, hey, check out my snake. It was just like I felt comfort around them.

0:04:38 - (Luke): I think because of my interests and because I did love them early on, and I wanted them near me, always, is what I think I felt. And having them at school, especially being a weird kid in school, finding comfort wherever you can, I think, was my goal there was to just have something that I liked and that I knew I loved as a comfort there around me, always. But, yeah, that was just a weird snake kid. My whole life, I'm still a weird snake kid.

0:05:07 - (Chris): So nice. And this was in the desert?

0:05:10 - (Luke): Yeah. This is all in Barstow, California. Yeah.

0:05:13 - (Chris): It's interesting to me because the desert is always, I think, associated in the popular mind with snakes. Even though I think there were probably more snakes per square meter where I had that original experience at age three in upstate New York. There's just so much more biomass there. Tons and tons more small rodents and insects and all that kind of stuff that snakes like to eat. Yeah, but the desert is really one of the first things snake phobes think about the desert is, oh, my God, there's snakes there.

0:05:44 - (Luke): Yeah. Like, you can't step out of your car without stepping on a snake. Yeah. Being the sole, like, snake kid or, like, in my family, most of the time, I deal with the questions all the time. Oh, are they poisonous? Aren't they gonna chase you? Like, stuff like that? It's just like you said, people associate the desert with just snakes. Snakes and critters. Right?

0:06:06 - (Chris): Yeah.

0:06:07 - (Luke): Yeah.

0:06:08 - (Chris): It was interesting. I was hiking at one point in a trail that's up above downtown Palm Springs in the foothills of the San Jacinto mountain, and there was an equestrian group approaching me, so I stepped off the trail onto a rock. There's a bunch of shrubs, you know, some low creosote and ephedra and things like that. But there was this big boulder. I just stepped over onto the boulder off the trail, and the pack boss came through, and he looked at me and he nodded and he smiled and he said, you're braver than I am.

0:06:38 - (Chris): And it took me a while to figure out what the hell he was talking about, but I was just stepping a foot off the trail, and I had seen a red diamond rattlesnake on that trail. It was certainly the calmest individual I encountered that day. It just waited for me to pass. And when I didn't, because he was, like, basically halfway across the trail, he said, okay, I guess I'll move. And he just moved. I have video of it somewhere. But caution is a great thing, being careful where you put your hands and your feet and all that kind of stuff, that's really important. But the idea that you're going to immediately run afoul of a snake, that's going to be in a really bad mood and bite you even though you're not food.

0:07:21 - (Luke): Right.

0:07:22 - (Chris): Is just, like, part of the desert lore, I think.

0:07:27 - (Luke): Yeah. And people don't realize that there's more than just, like, venomous snakes out there, too, right? Like, a lot of the time, if you're snake phobic, you just feel, or ophidiophobic is the actual term for that, but you just believe that all snakes can do you great harm. That's like, the basis of your fear is that this thing can hurt me in some way that's very serious. And all snakes can bite. Anything with a mouth can bite. And it's one of those things that we like as an educator. We talk to people about and we say, hey, the snake can do you harm, but there's degrees to it.

0:07:56 - (Chris): Right.

0:07:56 - (Luke): There's a spectrum of harm that it can inflict. If it's an eight inch newborn glossy snake, chances are it wouldn't break the skin. But if it's a Mojave rattlesnake, that's kind of the spectrum we're dealing with here. And, yeah, the desert, to our earlier point, people think that the desert is loaded with snakes just in sheer mass of like, numbers. Right. But it is full of snakes in a different sense. The desert is very biodiverse, something that you've discussed in the past, like on this podcast, and just in general, that our desert is full. The desert being what it is, drives biodiversity. Things here have to carve out niches. And this is no different. When we're talking about snakes, we have probably within, where we're sitting now close to 17, 18 species of snake.

0:08:41 - (Luke): Most of those are colubrids or non venomous snakes, maybe two or three species of rattlesnakes. So the non venomous snakes actually outweigh the amount of venomous snakes out there. And that's, I don't know if that's much comfort to people, but it's just making the point that not every snake can do you great harm.

0:08:58 - (Chris): Yeah.

0:08:59 - (Luke): A lot of the snakes out there are just insect eaters or they're lizard eaters or they're rodent eaters. They're doing that ecological service of, you know, keeping those populations down.

0:09:10 - (Chris): Yeah. Here within striking distance, so to speak, of where we're sitting right now. I've seen sidewinders within 100 yards of the house, which is not surprising. We're on a valley floor, is mostly sand and silt. There are some northern mojaves in this general vicinity. Hart and I ran into one up atop a sheep hole pass a couple years ago who was really pissed off at us because Hart, being a dog, had scared away this snake's dinner.

0:09:39 - (Chris): So it waited till we passed and then it rattled at us, which is really characteristic of the northern Mojaves I've seen. It's like they're badass up to a point and then speckled. Yeah. Once you get up the hills into the park a little bit, we've seen speckles up there and heart's actually almost tripped over one. We have a bunch of really chill, venomous snakes around here.

0:10:00 - (Luke): We do. Up here in the high desert. Those are the three that you'll probably run into as you get closer to foothills. Closer to the mountains, you get the southern Pacific. As you drop down into the Coachella valley, you'll get the red diamond and another subspecies of sidewinder, but, and then even further east, you get the western diamondback, which apparently is everywhere in California, according to people who just associate the rattlesnake with the western diamondback.

0:10:26 - (Luke): That's one of the things that we've always, as educators have had to discuss is not every rattlesnake is a western diamondback.

0:10:33 - (Chris): You mentioned going further east. I assume that there's some other interesting snakes, venomous rear fanger and completely non venomous, that show up once you get onto the other side of the Colorado. I hear about the Arizona coral snake, and I assume it's called that for a reason.

0:10:50 - (Luke): Yeah, yeah. We don't have coral snakes in the state of California. At least there hasn't been any record of them. There's some of my friends that are really hard set on finding the California coral snake, but I could honestly say that they've been after that snake for years and have never found a coral snake anywhere close to the California side of the river. Probably just because they're really tiny and they don't do well in large rivers.

0:11:15 - (Luke): But, yeah, as you get into Arizona, the snake diversity just goes crazy, especially as you head into southeastern Arizona. That's like the mecca for, like, snake and reptile diversity. And you get so many species of rattlesnake. You get so much. You get a lot of influence from, like, Mexico for a lot of species. That's the northernmost extent of their range in Mexico. They're all over the place in Mexico, and they just creep over the border in southeastern Arizona.

0:11:40 - (Chris): Yeah, I imagine that it gets even more strangely diverse the further east you get into the chihuahuan desert. I mean, the Rio Grande is not going to keep snakes from coming across the river anywhere around Big Bend, for sure. Snake could probably stay on the bottom and breathe the whole way across. But, yeah, I think you get into some more eastern species there and like, the Sierra madre oriental and snakes that are in just the general southeastern us.

0:12:09 - (Chris): Yeah, let's hear some snake stories.

0:12:12 - (Luke): I was reminded of one that in my years of, like, keeping snakes, there was a point in my adolescence where I kept everything. Like, I found out that you could find snakes all over the place. I love snakes. So every snake I found I brought home and I put it into a plastic shoebox or tupperware of some kind, like some kind of container, and hid it in my room. The numbers of snakes I had in my room was probably around 65. Snakes go for snakes. Every snake I could find, like I said.

0:12:40 - (Luke): And it, when you have 65 snakes that are all over a very small room in a very small house, in receptacles that don't have the most secure lids, they tend to get out. And we've always had snakes loose in our house. And my poor mother, God rest her soul, she did her damnedest to deal with that and to deal with a son who just consistently brought these animals into the house when he lost one. One gets out, I replace it with two.

0:13:06 - (Luke): And, yeah, I think where it came all to, came to a head for her was she was still doing my laundry at that point, and she brought a big hamper of my laundry out and was stuffing it into the washing machine. And she said she was stuffing it in there, and this huge four foot gopher snake, really common snake here, came flying out of the washer, and she said it tried to attack her. She was probably not trying to attack her, probably just trying to get out of the washing machine. But that was the breaking point for her.

0:13:36 - (Luke): She couldn't even do the thing that she probably shouldn't have been doing for a 13 year old without getting a snake in her vicinity, in her personal space. After that, she made me get rid of at least 45 snakes. Yeah, that was the beginning of my limits of what I could keep or what I should keep. And I bring up that story for a good reason. Collecting snakes is generally frowned upon by conservationists who see snakes for what they do, for our ecosystem, for what they contribute and what they are and why they're out there.

0:14:09 - (Luke): I think most of us are firm believers that they should stay put, that they should stay where they're at. They're there. They exist there. They have everything they need there. I agree to that to a degree. There. I agree to a degree. But I always bring up to folks that, like, there is a legal process in which to follow if you do want to collect a snake. And that's something that's public information, it's within California Department of Fish and Wildlife's permitting system. You could purchase a sport fishing license and go out and collect a snake, just like you could go fishing.

0:14:40 - (Luke): That's something that those fees go back and contribute to conservation. So generally it's good, but there's a degree of education that has to happen before people should go out and just start collecting snakes. Right. You don't want to end up with 60 of them in your room just because you can. And that's where the dilemma is, should you or shouldn't you? Do you have to? Do you want to? And if it wasn't for me doing that collecting and that hands on exploring of these snakes at a young age, probably illegally, mostly illegally, I didn't have a permit. I couldn't afford a permit.

0:15:17 - (Luke): I did it anyway, and I had them. If it wasn't for those experiences and learning about them and building that fascination by having them, I wouldn't be the conservationist I am today. I wouldn't be the advocate for these animals that I am today because I got to know them on a level that not a lot of people get to. All that said, I'm by no means advocating that everybody should go out there and collect snakes so that they can learn how to connect to the desert. But from my own experience, it was very important.

0:15:43 - (Luke): And that's why in my current role, I'm a really big advocate for legal recreation. Whether it be off highway, vehicle use, rock hounding, hunting, all those things are ways for people to connect. At least that's how I see them. And that's really the point I want to make, is that, like, legal collection of snakes, if it's well researched and well executed in a responsible and respectful way, then it can be very beneficial for people, young people especially, to have that gateway introduction into, like, conservation, if that makes sense.

0:16:22 - (Chris): It does, and I agree. I wonder, though, about. About where the line is between that and the kind of obsessive collecting, some of which is done by people that know a huge amount about snakes. That's probably why some of them get into collecting. Oh, I got the pioneer town gopher snake. Now I need to get the Queen mountain gopher snake. And for those of you who aren't from the Morongo basin, pioneer Town and Queen Mountain are like a 15 minutes drive away from each other.

0:16:52 - (Chris): It just. It does seem like the. The devil's in the details there. And taking a snake and giving it a warm place to live with some food for a couple of months while you learn about it. And then returning it is one thing, and then having an entire wall full of Vivaria is probably on the road to being something different.

0:17:11 - (Luke): Yeah. And those snakes that. That are really high target ones are the rosy boa, the California kingsnake. Our gopher snakes are the big three there. Those are all snakes that can be legally sold within the state as well, which kind of drives their over collection. For those three, there's a take limit each day. You take two a day per permit per person, sometimes more. I think it's more with the gophersnake, but that's really what drives that over collection. Is the monetary gain.

0:17:42 - (Luke): There's a potential there for monetary gain, and that's unfortunate. And I think that's where education kind of has to come into it, too, where people who do that need, they need education of some kind. They either need an education in population dynamics or how the populations work, or it always comes down to education of some sort. But, yeah, there are some people who probably have all those things who know that what they're doing probably is detrimental to the population and who go out there and collect and collect. Just add new genetics to their breeding project or to just have a snake that they could flip online for four or $500 or whatever they go for.

0:18:17 - (Luke): Yeah, there's always a line, and it's unfortunate that it happens and that it's legal that it happens, which is even more. It's a harder pill for a lot of folks, myself included, to swallow. Is that, like, all those things, what we see is, like, over collection, what we see as, like, irresponsible collection is technically legal. If you have their permit and they're going out there and collecting two a day, every day for four or five months, then that's something that they paid to do, which is the, which is a bummer. But I think that's where having people and educating people as advocates and as people who can speak up for these animals and for these landscapes, I think is really where that comes into play, is how do we change that? How do we make it harder for people to take advantage of a legal system?

0:19:00 - (Chris): Yep. And in California, that would be the fish and game commission that would tackle things like that. I will dig up information on other desert states and desert adjacent states and have that in the show notes. If you're in Texas, who do you talk to? That kind of thing. Do you have a favorite snake?

0:19:18 - (Luke): Yeah, I think that's a hard one. That's the hard question. I've thought about this time and time again, and it changes probably every single time I think about it. But I think overall, I've had some that have risen to the top of, with frequency of, like, how many times I've been like, I really love these snakes. And liar snakes are one that come to mind. My friend Paisley, who's listening, I hope will agree with me that liar snakes are probably one of the coolest colubrids out there.

0:19:50 - (Chris): Then you define colubrid. Yeah.

0:19:52 - (Luke): Yeah. So colubrid is like a long, skinny snake, non venomous, generally. With liar snakes, they are venomous. They're one of those rear fanged. I forget how you say the name ofistoglyphid. They have rear fangs and they use those rear fangs when they're eating prey to chew on them and then envenomate them. That's the way that they deliver their venomous is through like a big grooved tooth or two teeth in the back of their jaw.

0:20:15 - (Luke): And the liar snake, it's just a really unique looking snake. It's a really long, a long snake, long, kind of skinny, lives up in rocks, usually on the mouths of, like, caves and close to water, places where a lot of rodents and bats might show up. They do eat bats. They have really big, like, cat eyes. And their larger genus, like the other members of their genus, get larger as you move down into Mexico and South America. And that's one of those species that we are at like the northern extent of its range. So we get like the small, diminutive, desert version of what's normally down in the tropics.

0:20:48 - (Luke): Cause you have, like, tropical liar snakes. They get 8ft long and like, we, our little dinky liar snake gets 4ft long, but it's still cool. Yeah. Liar snakes are definitely the one that comes to mind most often than anything, just cause they're weird and eclectic. But I love the common stuff, too. Gopher snakes. Every time I see a gopher snake, I'm stoked just cause they have so much personality. They're also, they're interesting because they're rattlesnake mimics.

0:21:13 - (Luke): The great Basin gopher snake is the one that gets mistaken for rattlesnakes more times than any. Just because it'll flatten its head out, it'll make a triangle shape, it'll hiss, it'll shake its tail, it'll rear up and kind of strike at you like a rattlesnake. It really wants you to believe it's a rattlesnake. And unfortunately, it gets chopped up a lot because of that. It's too good at its job. Yeah.

0:21:35 - (Chris): I think my favorite snake is also the one I'm most nervous about, despite it being non venomous, at least around here. And that would be the red racer. Yeah. People have been reading my email newsletter for a while. Might remember a story from about five years ago of red racer deciding that it really wanted to live inside the house with us and we would put it outside and it would come back in. Lara at one point found it in the bathroom and coaxed it into a Tupperware container, which, because she's a field biologist, I think she basically just said, could you step into the Tupperware container, please. And the snake said, certainly.

0:22:20 - (Chris): I managed to get it out of the house at one point by cornering it, which is never a good idea, and then taking a pillowcase full of ice cubes and setting it on top of the thing and then getting another pillowcase and getting the momentarily bewildered snake almost out the door, which is when it woke up and tried to go back in the house. It was a mess, but I got it outside, and it hightailed toward the door, and I had to jump in front of it to keep it from going in the door, and it finally went across the road.

0:22:56 - (Chris): But then two days later, I walk into the house, and there's a ray of sunlight coming into the bedroom, and it's partly illuminating the bed and partly illuminating the floor. And Hart, the pit bull, is sitting in the illuminated part of the bed, and the snake is sitting in the illuminated part of the floor. They're just hanging out.

0:23:15 - (Luke): Yeah.

0:23:18 - (Chris): I do have video of that somewhere, which I will link, but, yeah, red racers are. They're amazing. They're crabby.

0:23:26 - (Luke): Oh, yeah. That's an understatement.

0:23:28 - (Chris): And of all the snakes in the desert, I think they're the ones that are most likely to bite you just because you pissed them off.

0:23:36 - (Luke): Yeah. Especially if you manage to get ahold of one like I used to a lot when I was younger. That was always the snake that was like, oh, I want to catch it. I need to catch it. It's, like, fast. How do I catch the fastest snake in the desert? I don't know. The things that go through your mind as, like, a 15 year old or something, but, yeah, when you grab them, they really don't like that either. They bite the heck out of you.

0:23:58 - (Luke): But, yeah, they are really interesting snakes. They're really smart snakes, which is something that I think they. They deserve us to talk about that. Right. They are very intelligent snakes. They're diurnal, for one. A lot of the snakes here in the desert are nocturnal or corpuscular, meaning they come out just as the sun is going down or coming up. Coach whips occupy a very unique space in the desert. They're active during the day, and for them to be active during the day, it means that they have to deal with a lot more sensory input.

0:24:27 - (Luke): They see a lot more things being out during the day, so they have to be able to process shadows and make out images a lot better. Like, they can work out if a rat is standing in a pile of sand or a scrubby area and work out that the rat is there. They're thinking. And when you look at them, and if you ever see one and you take the time and spend the time to look at it from a safe distance, you'll notice that it's looking around, it's looking around, it's examining where it lives, and it's looking for food, it's looking for shade, it's looking for predators.

0:25:01 - (Luke): It's just constantly observing. And that's why in comparison to a lot of other snakes, their eyes are so much bigger. They have huge eyes. Compared to most snakes, they also get really big. I think coach whips are one of the longest snakes in our desert. I think some of them can push up to 9ft long. It's a really long, skinny snake.

0:25:18 - (Chris): Is there a snake you haven't seen yet that's on your list?

0:25:22 - (Luke): Oh, yes. There is a variable ground snake that eluded me. There's a few that have eluded me, but that's the one I want to see the most. A variable ground snake is a very small snake. It's a very small. Almost looks like it gets mistaken for coral snakes a lot because it's colorful. It could be orangey banded with black saddles. Kind of things will be striped, but really tricky to find. In California, there's a few occurrences of them in certain mountain ranges along like the Nevada border. Closer you get to like Arizona. They're real common in Arizona and Nevada.

0:25:54 - (Luke): In California, they're lust. But there's records of them. I found dead ones. I've seen the records. I found dead ones just near my hometown in Barstow. And I've yet to find a living one. They're just really pretty snakes. And they look a lot like shovelnose snakes. And for those who don't know shovelnose snakes. Shovelnose snakes are very small, insect eating snakes that live in sandy areas. And they're yellow with black bands around them. Get mistaken for kingsnakes a lot.

0:26:20 - (Luke): If you don't know what a kingsnake is, it's a big snake with black and white bands or black bands in a white background.

0:26:26 - (Chris): If you don't know what a Kingsnake looks like, google it. You won't be sorry.

0:26:30 - (Luke): And that's speaking of googling things, if you do want to learn more about the snakes we have in the state, there are really great websites out there. Californiaherps.com is the go to that I like to point people to. Every single snake in the state is on that website. It'll tell you every single thing you want to know about any of them. There's ways to identify them and stuff, too. Yeah.

0:26:52 - (Chris): And we'll see if we can come up with some alternatives for the other states. For those of you listening, what do people get wrong about snakes?

0:27:01 - (Luke): I think what people get wrong about them is that they're malicious. I think a lot of the myths and the concerns around snakes is that they're out to hurt you. They exist to hurt you. And I think that's really. That's rooted in pop culture, in religion, especially. A lot of it comes from, like, the biblical serpent, right, where it's the great deceiver, that he's there to deceive mankind and to hurt us in some way. And I think that's where snakes begin their bad rep or begin picking up a bad rep.

0:27:29 - (Luke): Snakes aren't there to hurt people. Snakes, if you're talking about just their ecological role, they're here to keep pests down, whether those are insects, whether those are like mice, they're just really good at making sure that we're not overrun by those critters. And I think where people get it wrong is by taking them out, thinking that their role is somehow insignificant, is something that we get wrong a lot.

0:27:55 - (Chris): Have you ever been bitten by one that you would be nervous about being bitten by?

0:28:01 - (Luke): No. I try and be really careful about rattlesnakes. There's plenty of tools out there that you can use to keep you away from the bitey parts, the dangerous parts of a rattlesnake. And I take advantage of those fully every time I come across one. I've never felt compelled to touch one. I love them to death. But, yeah, there's. I've had close calls. There's been times. There was a time. Speaking of another snake story, I was driving home from my job at the Mojave Desert land Trust back in the day.

0:28:26 - (Luke): I was driving home to Barstow, and I was on highway 247, and I came across this beautiful big sidewinder. And there was a bunch of cars come in, and I didn't have anything to move this snake. A sidewinder. Of all the rattlesnakes out there, sidewinders are probably the less the one the rattlesnake that I would be least concerned about. Their venom isn't very. It's dangerous, but it's not always super life threatening. Nothing like a mojave or like a western diamondback. But even still, you don't want to get bitten by it. You probably lose a few fingers, and nobody wants that.

0:28:56 - (Luke): There was a moment where I considered just, like, kicking it off the road because there's cars coming. I didn't want this thing to get run over by a semi, which happens a lot on 247, which is something we could talk about next, too. But I had nothing else. But I had a sleeping bag in my car. So I got the sleeping bag and I was hitting this sidewinder off the road with a sleeping bag and I finally got it off the road, but the thing had bitten my sleeping bag probably like four times.

0:29:22 - (Luke): Yeah, I washed a sleeping bag and the snake lived. But yeah, that was close to me. Just cause my sleeping bag was right in my hand and it could have a few inches in either direction, I would have got my fingers. There are some snakes that I wouldn't want to get bitten by just because I don't know what would happen. The liar snake that I brought up earlier is one of those snakes. I don't necessarily want to get chewed on by one, mostly because there is a venom component in there that's geared toward mammals, which means it'll probably hurt a lot more.

0:29:55 - (Luke): I don't think there's ever been a record of a liar's neck killing anybody. But my hand would probably get really puffy, really painful kind of thing, and I just don't want to take that chance.

0:30:04 - (Chris): Yeah, yeah. Another avenue for people getting things wrong. You see the old school advice, you know, carry a snake bite kit with the little suction cups and a razor blade and you hear now that all that stuff is pointless, is that, yeah, snake bites, right?

0:30:23 - (Luke): Everybody wants to know what to do. I get that question a lot.

0:30:26 - (Chris): What do you do?

0:30:26 - (Luke): What do you do? If you ever get bit, what are you going to do? Asking me what I'm going to do. And I always tell them I'm just going to call 911 and head to the closest hospital if I can. That's really the best thing you could possibly do. Get to emergency medical care. Rattlesnake bites, contrary to popular belief, don't kill you in minutes. Even the most dangerous of them out there, the Mojave with the most toxic venom, you're looking at a few hours, depending on where you get bit before you start seeing really severe effects of that venom.

0:30:58 - (Luke): Of course, that's variable. You don't want to take the chance and assume you have 3 hours and take that risk. But in any case, any rattlesnake bite, if you're in the field, wherever you want to stop, you want to remain calm. You don't want to start getting freaking out and getting your blood pumping and running all over the place and getting your circulatory system moving. I just want to stay calm, get hold of somebody.

0:31:21 - (Luke): Either get to the trailhead and get into an ambulance and head it to the nearest hospital as soon as possible. It's always best to call ahead if you can. Here in the Morongo basin. Chances are you'll probably head straight to the Joss Retreat hospital. Here they have enough vancive to get you by to keep you stable before they send you off to Loma Linda. Any pretty much anywhere in southern California. Any snake bite in Southern California will get treated at Loma Linda Medical center in Loma Linda.

0:31:50 - (Luke): Yeah, but, yeah, don't start tourniqueting. Rattlesnakes have a pretty astounding degree of control over the amount of venom they want to hit you with. I think it's like one out of every three bites is a dry bite. Even if a rattlesnake did want to get rid of you, it'll bite you and it knows that it'll get you to go away. Yeah, it's very biologically expensive to make venomous. That's something that snake has to invest a lot of energy and resources into making.

0:32:15 - (Luke): And to waste it on a big, clumsy human is exactly what the snake sees it as. It's potentially a waste when it could be using it to catch food that's going to keep it alive. Unless you really messed with a snake, chances are it's not going to hit you with everything. But like I said, you can't always count on that.

0:32:32 - (Chris): And snakes are individuals, of course, that come to have differently.

0:32:35 - (Luke): Definitely. If you're listening, you have a dog and you live in snake country, in the desert, you have a backyard that opens up into the open desert or a chain leaf fence that separates your yard from the rest of the world, especially the open desert. Consider getting your dog rattlesnake trained. To build a sort of aversion to rattlesnakes is always a good idea. There's a really good company here in town, and if you're in the Morongo basin that does a really great job with training dogs and it saves dogs on multiple occasions. The dog just learns to avoid snakes and to leave them alone. It just limits bites. So if you have a furry friend out there and you want to keep them from putting their nose in the wrong snake's face, then definitely consider that.

0:33:18 - (Chris): Any thoughts about the rattlesnake vaccines that vets encourage you to get for your dog?

0:33:23 - (Luke): I think that they help. I don't think that they're a cure all. I think it like you still want to get your dog into a vet and everything. I don't know that they work for every dog. I know my friends who are listening out there who've said this time and time again are probably yelling at me through the radio or whatever they're listening to this on saying, you know this, but I forgot with that said, I would say that it's not a cure all. You should still get your dog to a vet. And Aaron or Eric, if you're listening, just text me and show mercy.

0:33:51 - (Chris): Let him have it. Erin or Eric. So you were gonna say something about snakes on roads. Oh, yeah.

0:33:56 - (Luke): This kind of goes into conservation. Wherever snakes have an ecological importance and they play a role, and that role is important to us in keeping pests at bay and keeping the. If rodents are disease carriers, they can carry the plague, they can carry all kinds of nasty diseases. Snakes are the things that take that out of the ecosystem and away from us. So losing them can be pretty catastrophic for us, too.

0:34:21 - (Luke): And I bring it up on. I bring up the roads just because that's a huge killer of snakes. Highway 247, where I grew up, just outside of Barstow, it was a road that I grew up driving night after night, looking for snakes on the road. So when they come out, they would come to the road to just soak up some heat as they were cruising around on cooler nights. That's where I found a lot of them. But between when I started doing that, in maybe the early two thousands, late nineties, and now, the amount of snakes that you see on that road has dropped off to almost nothing or back, even within the past, I don't know, five, six years.

0:34:55 - (Luke): You've noticed that even really a much steeper decline just with the amount of traffic, because of the trendiness of the area of the desert, it's drawing more and more people to it, which means its roadways are getting more and more congested, even back roads like Highway 247, which connects Barstow to Lucerne Valley, to the Victor Valley, and over to Yucca Valley. That travel corridor has become so much more used by trucks carrying produce and stuff. But my point being, we're seeing really startling declines. And I've driven that road now, and I'm lucky if I find one snake.

0:35:27 - (Luke): Whereas, like, when I first, maybe five or six years ago, I would find 1520 snakes a night. I do a few passes and hit my quota and say, damn, I had a really good night, found a lot of snakes, I could go home, but now we spend, I think some of my buddies and I have spent driving that road hours on end and seen maybe one or two snakes. And my theory is that the hundred or so yards on either side of roads like that have become ecologically dead.

0:35:57 - (Luke): Everything that lives in that road, that the road is within its like, radius of existence, has been taken out. It's been hit by a car, and there hasn't been any kind of recruitment to replace them. There can't be, because every time there's recruitment, a car hits that, too. So I'm bringing that up just to put onto people's radar that like, one, if you see a snake on the road, please don't swerve to hit it. Not that anybody listening to this podcast would get the word out there that those snakes are important, especially those remaining snakes that are on the road.

0:36:29 - (Luke): We want to make sure that they're out there reproducing and refilling that ecological niche just because the sides of the road are important, too. It's still our desert, and it's still. It's the part of the desert that you see when you drive around. So it's valuable in that, right?

0:36:45 - (Chris): Yeah. Yeah. It's not always easy to avoid them. I nailed a rosy boa on Mission Lakes Boulevard and Desert hot springs a few weeks ago, and it was managed to have a good day anyway. But I almost didn't just because of that.

0:37:01 - (Luke): Yeah, it happens to the best of us. I've been, like I said, I've been looking for snakes on the road and training my eyes to look for snakes on the road for 25 years now. I could say from going with my dad to doing it by myself, and I still hit him. There's only so much you can do when it's like, if it's a coach whip, which moves really fast, comes shooting off the side of the road and right under your tire. You can't swerve and roll your vehicle to avoid hitting a snake, which is unfortunate. I always try and stop and dispatch them if they're suffering or whatever, but you can't always do that either. Sometimes you get a the line of cars behind you and it doesn't happen. But yeah, don't feel bad if you hit snakes. Just try to do your best. Otherwise, in telling people how great they are and how important they are and why you love them so much.

0:37:49 - (Chris): Lucas Basalto, a belated happy world snake day to you. And thanks for coming on this podcast and chatting about your zero legged buddies.

0:37:59 - (Luke): Absolutely, anytime. This is something I could probably talk for days about. So am I the, am I the recurring guest now?

0:38:08 - (Chris): I think technically, yeah.

0:38:09 - (Luke): Has anybody been anybody else?

0:38:11 - (Chris): Mason and Patrick are going to be up there somewhere. Mason's done three episodes. I think you and Mason might be tied.

0:38:19 - (Luke): I'm coming for you, Mason. If not, I feel like this is for those of you who watch Saturday Night Live, there's like an elite club of frequent hosts. I feel like I'm in that company now. Or like frequent guests. Happy to come on anytime.

0:38:33 - (Chris): You're like the Joan Rivers of high praise.

0:38:38 - (Luke): High praise.

0:38:54 - (Chris): And that wraps up another episode of 90 miles from the Desert Protection podcast. Thanks very much to Luke Basulto for joining me here in the, well, not a studio studio. Since our last episode, we have not had any new donors join our merry band of financial contributors. And this happens every now and then, but we really can't afford to have it happen too often. So please, if you've been meaning to donate to the desert advocacy media network, our mothership, any amount, large, small, medium, get over to 90 milesfromneedles.com.

0:39:34 - (Chris): donate or text the word needles to 5355 and you'll be given a bunch of options for ways you can help us out. And while we don't have new donors to thank this week, I did mispronounce the name of one of our new donors last time around. So Dan Lape, here is your belated and mostly correct, thank you. We really appreciate your helping us out here. Also want to thank, as always, Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha, our podcast artwork guy.

0:40:06 - (Chris): Our theme song, moody western is by Brightside Studio. And the brief portion we used of a now 20 plus year old viral video, Badger, Badger. Badger is by Mister Weeble. That's a little piece of Internet trivia for you. Thanks as always for listening. We will be back next week. Please stay hydrated and take care of yourselves. It's really hot. It's going to stay really hot for the foreseeable future.

0:40:35 - (Chris): We will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy media network, our channel.