The docents at the garden park bring out the slimy creepy crawlers every Friday morning. I wanted to take Nicco and his little buddy and yesterday, being the first day of summer break, we went.
We were greeted by three quail families...so stinkin' cute! I love them! My friend's kids laughed at me for behaving so giddily at the little quails, all in a row.
We watched the quails for a bit before heading up to the rotunda for the reptile demonstration.
We saw a whole bunch of snakes. A gopher snake, a king snake, a coral snake, some other kind of snake, and a rattle snake. We learned that gopher snakes and king snakes are good to have around. Both will eat mice and rats, and king snakes will eat rattle snakes!
The guy said not to be afraid of rattlesnakes. They are not aggressive. They rarely bite, mostly when they're being harassed by drunken males between the ages of 16 and 28. Hmmm. Who would have guessed. The most likely demographic to harass snakes. He told us the dos and don'ts of snakebites...call 911 or get to a hospital immediately. (Duh) If you're out in the middle of nowhere, walk, don't run, and calmly walk to where you can get help. (Yes. Remain calm. Remember that when you're snakebit in the middle of nowhere.) Don't do the cowboy move...cutting it open and sucking out the venom totally doesn't work. It just allows the venom to go deeper into the body and do more damage. And, don't believe the "do it yourself" methods you might see on the internets. Peeing on the bite won't neutralize it, neither does electricity. Just ask the drunk male, roughly 25 years old, who had his drunk buddies take a picture of him kissing a rattlesnake. They heard that electricity neutralizes snake venom so they hooked up the jumper cables to the truck battery and their idiotic friend's face. You can guess what happened. If you can't, then you're probably stupid enough to try it yourself to find out.
We took the kids who were done listening to snake stories to the children's garden to float boats down the little river fountain. Then we wandered the other parts of the garden. We saw the pup fish pond, a lizard doing push-ups under a saguaro, and the various statuary in the gardens.
The kids played in this fountain in the Moorish Garden.
Because they were tired.
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