This toad lives in my friend’s basement, and has lived down there for years.  Sometimes we wonder if it ever gets lonely.

Yes, you heard right.  George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, is blogging from the great beyond. Actually, it’s the organization who runs The Orwell Prize that’s doing the blogging, publishing Orwell’s diaries exactly 70 years from the day each entry was written. And in the very first post, George describes catching a snake.

Delilah writes:  "Do you know much about snakes? We saw a skinny 2′ green one." That snake looks like what we used to call a ‘vine snake’ and they’re harmless.  It looks to be, officially, a "Rough Green Snake" (Opheodrys aestivus).  That’s my guess based upon the area where you found it, otherwise I’d eyeball […]

I’ve heard that snakes will swallow strange things, like, oh, alligators, and I personally saw a little garter snake trying to eat a sparrow way too large for it to ever successfully swallow. Here, however, is a National Geographic article about a Australian Carpet Python who has a taste for golf balls:  Python Undergoes Golf […]

Summer nights in a small suburb of Tucson, Arizona, way back in 1967, out of my house would stalk a mighty hunter. Six years old, wearing shorts and a tee shirt, high-top tennis shoes, and carrying a flashlight, a bucket, and a butterfly net, I stalked off through the streets in search of prey. It […]

Out lizard hunting one morning I saw a pair of very fast, thin snakes which crossed the dirt road in front of me, side by side, their heads held high off the ground. The two looked like a team, and this sent a thrill through me. I’d never seen snakes do this before. Their movements […]

One of the things they have in Texas that we didn’t have out in California are box turtles. During certain times of the year, when these turtles are feeling the call of nature and plodding about looking for love, they tend to wander onto highways with disastrous results. One of my in-laws at the time […]

Across the street from my childhood home was open desert, and when I was about 8 years old and was feeling the freedom of my first bicycle, my friends and I would go out and ride for miles down dirt roads that crisscrossed through the cactus and brush. We explored ruins of adobe buildings where […]