Posted by:
chrish
at Wed Aug 10 00:09:26 2011 [ Report Abuse ] [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by chrish ]
Yes. I was birding in Chiapas with a friend and she looked up ahead of us and asked "is that a snake hanging from that tree?".
Here's what she saw (although this was taken about 20 minutes later). The snake was swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

We figured a hawk had the snake hanging down so we approached closer but noticed this -

You can see the big lump in the Lyresnake in this photo. Just holding up the mass of that Lyresnake and its meal must have been exhausting to the cribo. I suspect the original fight must have been impressive!

We watched it for about 30 minutes or so as it swallowed it, then before it finished it got tired of the idiot with the camera and climbed backwards further up the tree.

We left it alone at this point. It has worked really hard for that meal.
And while Lyresnakes rarely exceed 3 feet in the US, T. biscutatus commonly exceed 5 or 6 feet in the southern parts of their range. I've seen photos of one that was probably 7 feet long. They are black rat/texas ratsnake in size. For comparison, that lump in the lyresnake was probably a big rat or maybe a small Iguana. ----- Chris Harrison San Antonio, Texas
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