I'm still on jury duty and have no spare time. I'm submitting an older post from my blog which relates in a small way. The picture of me in Bali is over a decade old.....can we count it as sepia?
- Richard, my husband,
found a snake skin in the grove. It's got the head part attached which
is a good thing for the snake. They shrug out of the skin but sometimes
the head doesn't get de-skinned and the snakes have problems seeing.
- One cat, Pink, thought the skin deserved a closer inspection. The other cat, Buster, couldn't get away fast enough.
- Here's
our Vietnamese friend Diep in the Mekong Delta with a snake when we
traveled with her years ago and on our deck in Fallbrook. Diep now
lives in Canada in Montreal where the snakes are in short supply.
- But
they weren't in short supply number-wise where I grew up in the
Canadian prairies. Here's a garter snake mating ball. I saw a small ball
like this one on the farm; the stuff nightmares are made of.
I
refreshed my memory about these snakes from Wikipedia. Garter snakes go
into a kind of hibernation before mating. Males emerge first bursting
with hormones and starving (the worst kind). They wait for the females
to wake up and emerge from their dens when they are jumped by the males,
as many as 25 on a female. That'd be enough to make any female stay in
seclusion. A tangled ball results with the whole unromantic mess rolling
around in the dust. It's a very intense, frantic scene - nature's
brute survival mechanism hard at work. Interestingly, the female can
store sperm for years after fertilization. Score another one for Mother
Nature...if a female snake had to go through getting balled this way
every year, there'd be no more snakes.
- Snakes
one at a time don't bother me - in fact I find them kind of
interesting. Here's me in Bali with a nice little guy. The typical
tourist thing - "get your picture taken with a snake".
- And a little musical accompaniment about things reptilian....
- P.S. I remembered a photo of a cart I saw in India recently being pulled by the skinniest animal I've ever seen.
- Slither on over to Sepia Saturday to read more interesting stories about carts, gypsies, boho fashions and caravans.
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