Not, not a "rain snake"! Silly...
We have rain to day... thunder, lightning, power outages, the works. Of course, our spring and summer rain ALWAYS comes with all of the special effects. There seems to be more of it this year, though.
We have the dumbest snake in the world. It's some flavor of kingsnake, supposedly a great hunter and mighty in the snake world. Though it is smallish in diameter (thumb) it is quite long (about five or six feet? You ever try to measue a snake?).
We feed it dead, frozen, re-warmed mice with vitamins on them. Magical mice from the sky.
When he's hungry, he looks to the roof of his cage for dinner. He probably also performs some snakey good-luck ritual, a slithery version of a cargo cult.
Sometimes he gets a bit over-eager and misses the mouse on the first strike. Once he does get it, though, he thoroughly squeezes the life out of it (hah!) and swallows it whole. It's all quite interesting.
Once he missed and instead hit the edge of a small square of green covering... a kind of stiff felt. Then he proceeded to try and squeeze his carpet to death so he could swallow it. We figured he would figure out his mistake (mouse... carpet... mouse... carpet... how hard can it be?). But no. We had to pry him off.
He has done that twice. We no longer feed him a mouse on a platform.
Yesterday he one-upped this event. He had the mouse and was valiantly squeezing the life out of it, when he lost track of where it was. He does that a lot. Sometimes we have to re-dangle the mouse to re-orient him.
THIS time, searching for the mouse, he pretty much tied himself into a knot and then... get this... started to eat his own midsection. You know. Chewing on his abdomen.
Ummmm.
And he didn't stop on his own.
It turns out that if you squirt a snake with water, they let go of whatever they are doing and try to run away. So we saved him from himself, quite literaly.
He eventually un-knotted and ate the mouse.
We have a really dumb snake.
Posted by Edwin at June 25, 2004 01:17 PM