Great Plains Ratsnake

Notes:

In 2012, I worked on Fort Hood as a field biologist on the Black-capped Vireo Monitoring Program. The Black-capped Vireo (see http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/154... and http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/128...) is a federally endangered species that has disappeared from much of its native range due to habitat loss, and this is compounded by the increase in Brown-headed Cowbirds. Brown-headed Cowbirds are a brood parasite, meaning they do not build their own nests, they lay their eggs in the nests of other species. They have done this for thousands of years, and would migrate with bison herds across the prairie. Without the bison herds to follow, cowbirds have grown accustomed to hanging out with the cows, and their numbers have exploded...to the detriment of many species of songbirds. Brown-headed Cowbirds are particularly adept at finding vireo nests, removing the vireo eggs and/or laying their own eggs in the nest for the vireo parents to raise. So, although cowbirds are native, our activities as humans have caused a shift in the ecology of the cowbird, and it is destroying other native songbird populations. Biologists have taken action to counter this in areas that are significant breeding areas for birds threatened by high levels of brood parasitism by reducing cowbird populations. The reason I mention all of this is because one of my duties was to trap cowbirds near vireo habitat, and to do so I set up a large cage and stocked it with some cowbirds that I had captured in mist nets. The live "decoy" cowbirds attract other cowbirds who slip through a slot in the top of the cage, a slot the birds cannot fly back out of, and are thus trapped. This brings me finally to the snake. The snake figured out that the trap was full of delicious cowbirds! If you check out photo 3, you will see a suspicious bulge in the middle of the snake. A cowbird. Every couple of weeks this snake would squeeze into the trap and eat a cowbird or two, and with its stomach too large to now escape from the trap, trapped itself. I would let it out of the cage only to find it in there again later too fat to escape. Geez. Sorry for the long explanation!