Tucson Animal Tails: Why You Should Like Snakes

Arizona Daily Star, July 23, 1989

It is not easy to live in that continuous awareness of things which alone is true living. Even those who make a parade of their conviction that sunset, rain and the growth of a seed are daily miracles are not usually much impressed by them as they urge others to be.

—Joseph Wood Krutch

The Desert Year

Rattlesnakes are supposedly nobody’s pals. They are rarely included in the list of desert inhabitants that are routinely hailed and heralded.

Some two-legged desert rats have even been known to stop the car, go back and kill such a serpent before proceeding on to a favorite parking spot from which to view the sunset.

The incongruity boggles the mind. But the, not all nature lovers think all nature was created equal. Some have trouble praising the poisonous along with the pretty.

Not so the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. The birth of baby rattlers is a cause for rejoicing for the staff of a place dedicated to this desert and its creatures.

And so it should be. The six little rattlers born recently at the museum are Grand Canyon rattlesnakes, a breed that’s neither threatened nor endangered. Their birth in captivity is something rare, but that alone is no cause for celebration.

The birth is something to get excited about because it is a reminder that such births take place all the time all over the desert to all sorts of creepy, slithering, beautiful creatures. The desert is alive with things that are wondrous not solely because humankind has deemed them worthy of note.

It is alive with things that, as naturalist Krutch wrote, can remind us of “something which a certain kind of person is rather prone to forget—that there are other creatures in the world beside himself.”