Canopy Roads of South Georgia

What's in the fun box?

Well, that looks like fun!

Let's open it up and see:

Snake of the night

The dogs found this, about one foot from the house:

Yep, it's a timber rattler. You can't see the rattles in this picture (although you can in these other ones by Gretchen), but it had three.

So I put it in a box. It didn't like that: it really rattled. We drove it to a better spot in the woods, where it's very happy now.

Good dogs, Yellow Dog and Brown Dog! They notified us but did not try to bite the snake.

Pictures by John S. Quarterman and Gretchen Quarterman, Lowndes County, Georgia, 1 June 2011.

-jsq

Update 8:45 AM 3 July 2011: Fixed picture link and added link to flickr set with Gretchen's additional pictures.

What's in the log?

It's just a log, right? So why are the dogs so interested?

Here's a better look:

Are there snakes there?

Answering Nancy's question:

Why yes, there are snakes. This timber rattler was crawling into the vines:

Two Views of a Timber Rattler

Hard to see in this picture:

Much easier to see in this one:

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

The other day somebody asked me to recommend some books about longleaf forests, how they used to be, what happened to them, what can be done now.

I was going to start by posting a short list, but each item was turning into a review, so I'll just post them one by one as reviews.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (The World As Home), by Janisse Ray.

How dirt poor crackers and corporate greed destroyed most of the most diverse ecosystem in North America; yet these same people are the tragic heroes of the book. Half autobiography, half ecology, this book will either get you with Janisse's "stunning voice" or you won't get it. If you're from around here, you'll hear the wind in the pines, feel the breeze, and see the summer tanagers yellow in the sun. If you're not, here's your chance to meet a "heraldry of longleaf" up close and personal.

"I will rise from my grave with the hunger of wildcat, wings of kestrel...."

See Janisse read in Moultrie. "More precious than handfuls of money." See her wikipedia page for a pretty good bio.

But read the book. If nothing else, you'll never think the same again about Amazon deforestation once you realize we already did that to ourselves, and in the south we live in the devastated remnants of what was one of the most extensive forests on earth, with longleaf pine trees 100 feet tall and 500 years old, maintained by fire, protecting everything from the Lord God bird to the lowly Bachman's sparrow, from the rattlesnake-eating indigo snake to the beetles that live in gopher tortoise burrows. The forest can return, because reforestation can pay. Meanwhile, there are still places where you can see how it used to be. Janisse Ray had a lot to do with preserving Moody Forest, too, but that's another story.

-jsq

Squirrel and Snake

Why did the squirrel shake its tail?

Look closely in the bottom center.

Or try this one:

In the Grass

Why did the snake cross the road?

To get out of the way of the car. Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, 29 August 2009, Lowndes County, Georgia. Click through to the big picture to count the 9 rattles on this timber rattler.

Update: added links to just the snake

Happy Fourth

In memory of that old privateer, Commodore Essex Hopkins (1718 - 1802), first ranking officer of the U.S. Navy, and my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, here's a picture of the Commodore's flag: DONT TREAD ON ME.

Fred's Rattler

Fred accidentally ran over a timber rattlesnake.  It was still crawling.  Maybe it's OK.