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A 2.4m long Green Mamba caught this Village Weaver then dropped the prey onto the ground below. Within 30 seconds it went down onto the ground and positioned itself to ingest the bird and once the bird was partially swallowed it pulled itself back into the undergrowth and later was seen in the tree with a lump in its body. There is a resident pair of these snakes in my garden that I see regularly. I have posted this same snake earlier this year with a Grey-headed Sparrow. Has a yellow scale above its right eye. It hunts over my bird table in the garden.

Eating a southern pacific rattlesnake. 9 photos. FYI: we did come back the same direction 30 minutes later and saw the same snake (full belly) on a patch of asphalt about 10 yards from where we first saw it, as if giving itself belly heat (air temps were still around 80 degrees). Due to some comments received about regurge, I also went back in the daylight the next day, and checked the area and did not find a regurged rattler. I believe the king kept it down.

As my 1000th observation submitted to iNaturalist, here is something a little different and unusual from my archives.

My colleagues and I took this photograph of an actual original and unique X-Ray (physical "hard copy") film made in the Emergency Room of the University hospital in which I worked night shifts back in 2002. It was the regional center for medical treatment of snake bites in north central Florida.

This snake had bitten someone late at night, roughly in the vicinity of Cross Creek, southeast of Gainesville, as I remember, and the snake was killed and brought to the E.R. as proof of the species of poisonous snake that had inflicted the bite, for antivenom administration purposes. There were a couple different types of antivenom then, and they usually took a little time to reconstitute or prepare. All pit vipers in Florida inject similar venom when they bite, but it is different from that of the Coral Snake for instance, which is North America's only native Cobra. Having the actual body of the snake delivered to the E.R. is not absolutely necessary of course, but it does insure correct identification as to species, for whatever that may be worth, at the time, and in later analysis.

While identifying a snake from an X-Ray photograph may be a little unusual, it is not so difficult in this case as some might imagine. After all, here is a very large Pit Viper, totally without tail rattles, in Alachua County Florida.

Just how big was it? Coiled up as you see, it almost doesn't fit on a piece of film that was 11 by 14 inches in size. The snake's head, distorted a bit by the trauma of its demise, alone is nearly 3 inches long, measured directly on the film itself. The snake's coiled body, head to tail, can be measured on the original film by laying a piece of string on the image, tracing the course of the backbone. At 58 inches, or 4 feet 10 inches (147 centimeters) then, this a pretty large snake as Water Moccasins go.

What's more, one of the reasons we X-rayed it at all was that it had clearly recently eaten something. It had a large bulge in it's stomach, down about a third of it's body length, just past its air-filled lungs that are visible on the film as well defined darker shapes. We found the bulge was a big fish with a large blunt bony head, very visible swim bladder, which we took to be a catfish, though we lacked an Ichthyologist amongst the E.R. staff of course. I can follow the fish's spine for quite a ways in the image, but lose it somewhere along the snake's lung in the extreme right of the picture. We did not, in any case dissect the snake in the E.R. Nor did we weigh it, unfortunately. For all I know, the patient, who survived with the help of our treatment, took the dead snake and its last meal home with him when he was discharged.

The Technician that made the actual exposure for us on film, at my request, wrote the details of the exposure for future reference on the film itself, which, though the film suffered damage when it was stolen from my vehicle inside a locked briefcase and dumped out in a back alley and further mistreated both by the thieves and the weather, I can still read most of what he wrote with a "magic marker":
"40(or 46) MA
1 MAS
56 KV"
Are there any X-Ray Tech's out there who can confirm that that is in fact a good exposure for a big dead snake?

Rough Greensnake catching an orbweaver spider. It got close to the web and then stayed there for what felt like 10 minutes (not sure it was waiting to figure out how to catch the spider or because I had disturbed it). After a while, it finally caught the spider and seemed to have no trouble eating it. My first time seeing a wild snake catch its prey!

With Don Fraser; a visit to check on the status of the Sparkleberries -- they are in prime condition now. The weather at the start was sunny and 52 degrees ("feels like" 52) with calm winds. At noon, it was sunny and 72 degrees ("feels like" 72), with a light breeze; it seemed warmer than that. Because this was a visit for hairstreaks, we had 2+ hours to spend before we could reasonably expect the butterflies to come out (it really was around 1100). As a result, we walked all the trails, including "the back 40" and the road to the barn. We finished the visit with nearly an hour at the main Sparkleberry patch, where we saw 4 Great Purple Hairstreaks and one Mangrove Skipper -- we saw one White M Hairstreak and another Mangrove Skipper on "Hairstreak Hill." The Mangrove Skippers were at least one mile east of the nearest mangroves; these are the third and fourth records for the Preserve. We left at 1308.

Digital scan from my color slide. Ordway Preserve (= Ordway-Swisher Biological Station), near Smith Lake, Putnam Co., Florida. 9 Mar 1985.

Amelanistic specimen. Reported in: Stuart, J.N. and C.K. Dodd, Jr. 1985. Life History Notes: Cemophora coccinea copei. Coloration. Herpetological Review 16:78.

A typical Payne's Prairie eastern king snake. They were common 50 years ago, when the prairie had huge numbers of water loving snakes. Over a thousand snakes (mostly banded water snakes and Florida green water snakes) were often run over and killed on a given night in the summertime on the two major highways that cross the basin, and eventually the snake populations crashed. Now, there are far fewer water snakes and perhaps no king snakes at all.

The story as I remember it on this one. Someone sent me a text saying they found this snake and had it in a bucket but wanted me to ID it. They "tossed a lizard in with it". I got there later and looked in the bucket under something they had and it was eating the ground skink. Kind of freaked me out when I saw it for two reasons, they had a protected species in a bucket which is a no no and the fact that it was eating a skink. Any website you go to at this point only listed crowned snakes as their food source. Since this pic you see more than just snakes listed. I caught a lot of hell for this pic I took and encouraged the home owner to release it back where he found it after it finished eating