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Someday I may find her a mate but the babies can be a pain to get started sometimes...she loves f/t and eats rat pups like they are going out of style. Its hard NOT to give in to her begging but I dont want any fatty liver issues so I keep her lean.
Cheers
Brett

...that looks like a SW Utah winder to my eye....gorgeous! BTW, if you offer them their preferred prey; lizards..neonates & adult winders are normally easy to start feeding in captivity.

Heres a ?...how far down into Baja does cerastes range? Here in central Az they appear to range well away from typical loose sandy soils & occupy most creosote flats and even the rockier bajadas that continue on into creosote flats, so it would appear much of baja other than the mountains would be suitable hab.

If winders were rare, I bet they'd be one of the most coveted crotalids of all.

Cheers / RxR

Thanks, she is a pretty one I picked up several years ago near Blythe. According to what Ive read they reach down into eastern Baja, Llano de San Pedro and Isla Tiburon apparently. The little book by Schwalbe, Lowe, and Johnson shows their range to be well north and west of Tucson but heres one I found on Gates Pass. I guess they dont read the guidebook much! LOL

np

...Thnx for the baja info, youd think theyd be all over the coastal areas like they are in NW Sonora...
I saw your post on that T. Mtn. find awhile back, its a good E. locale for sure. N of Phx., the winders dont seem to extend as far up the long outwash slope as they should, the records at ASU [as I recall] stop ~ 15-20 mi N of downtown, but the habitat extends N for 30-40 miles??
I had a gr8t discovery this week...lowland leopard frogs re-colonizing an area where theyve been absent for at least 4 years..

RxR

That red color on the snake is the red sand that the snake is kept in. And probably not a good thing to have an animal living in such a dusty environment constantly. Certainly not the way you find a sidewinder in the wild, at least in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. Utah winders can have that reddish color, but it isnt from their substrate. They're born with it.

actually really!LOL the snake has a pinkish cast, quite common in Sonoran winders, she is kept on orange sand and it leaves some on her but its hardly dusty, that would require a wee bit of wind (unlikely in her tank). Shes been living on it for over 3 years now and does quite well. Ive never heard of death by sand, especially when winders evolved in it.

That is an amazingly pink [by my experience]...Blythe area cerastes & Ive seen a half ton of em; mostly a brownish tan, to nearly white around Borrego, the latter of which I like as much as your pink.
Gassoway & others have documented color shifts in Az Blacks...mebbe the winders are capable of adjusting a bit too??? Why else would those in SW Utah be so pink.
I agree..a winder is such a spectacular live display; they should be on medium to coarse sand, not shavings or heaven forbid...newspaper...& sand cleans up fairly easily...
OK, crotalid trivia..what is the most un-likely crotalid actually found in this habitat...

Cheers, RxR

C.cerastes if you are at the extreme northern end of the TDF (which would be the extreme southern end of cerastes range in Sonora). The other forms would be atrox, tigris,and basimolossuliscus.

....winders...no way-jose, not in this thick stuff. Mebbe along the coastal areas this far south, but not up here. The others you mentioned are there, but I wouldnt call em unusual...so we'll just hafta leave the challenge hanging a bit longer...theres probably at least 2 good answers...
I'll hafta root out a jpg of a Utah winder that Brian Eager posted awhile ago...
BTW Rich...those corale jpgs on the SSF are incredible, its interesting that the easterners w/ their ready access to all sorts of small feedersakes havent taken to working w/ sonoran corales eh??? Now heres an Elaps that probably shouldnt be free handled...

Cheers, RxR

I was thinking rattlesnakes, but there is another Crotalid. El Pichicuate, se llama "Cantil" tambien (Agkistrodon bilineatus). Don't think I am missing any other crote unless you are far enough east for lepidus. Love them little Elaps egalis! Yeah, I'm very carefull when feeding mine. He comes flying out of his leaves snapping at everything that moves.

forgot to say thanks on the coral pics. I too am surprised that easterners aren't more into them. I do always see groups of them for sale from Florida dealers during the summer. Perhaps they don't do well with an eastern diet. I have seen many western snakes succumb to eastern reptile and amphib prey due to a lack of resistence to eastern parasites/pathogens transmitted by the prey items.

Holas, yeah the cantil was definitely the nasty I was thinking of , but a freeking water moccasin woulda work't too! We western'rs arent used to that level of nasty in our marshlands!

According to my radar imagery...youre getting an early monsoon up there

On to otro bidness...

tried to do a little road cruisin tonight but it was too cold for anything but Spea. Very nice little winder!

Now thats a pretty winder! Was that taken in situ, or did you find that one and set him up for the shot? Great pic and a pretty snake, looks just like some of the ones Ive seen between Phoenix and Blythe on some sideroads.

Cheers
B

Hiya, some of those crotalids you listed are completely unknown to me, so we can likely add those to the heap of "un-seens" too!
I dont know, I think Brian Eager took that shot & Im still saying I never saw a pink az-cali-winder...specs/tigers/rubers/hopis/western-d's...yes.
But I like it on those winders...ya otta see the gilas from SW Ut.....Incredible most of them

winders that are just as colorful as any S.W Utah snake in the area west of Tucson. Granted, most are a tan color but I have seen many that are very reddish or pinkish/orange and one that was literally a bright lipstick pink, and thats no exageration, it was just like Barbie's Corvette.

All rattlesnakes are capable of color shifts. Some are very subtle, some are very pronounced. I have definately noticed it in winders. It seems to me the degree to which a rattlesnake can change is not dictated by which species it belongs to but seems to vary from one individual to the next. And I don't know if some are more capable of color change than others or if the degree is a matter of their choosing or mood. Would make for a cool study, but how would one go about it?

S. ravus
Crotalus stejnegeri
Crotalus lannomi
or Crotalus lepidus
those are the ones that immediately come to mind for the area, though there are others but I think its one of these.

I will ask my own... why would one population of speckled rattlesnakes match the rocks that it lives in, and another population of the same rattlesnake be colored differently to match the rocks that they live amongst? The answer is the same for the cerastes, and for any other animal species/subspecies/population/etc. that relies on crypsis for part of its self defense.

It really looked like that snake had a lot of the orange dust on her, and the Utah snakes tend to look very orange. I wasn't really getting at any pinkish tinge to the beige, which definitely isn't uncommon in Cerastes. Sorry about that.

Its one of the reasons I scooped her up, I had been finding juvies all night, typical tan color for the most part, when I came across her and noticed how pretty she was. Most of the ones Ive seen in AZ are like this, a salmon, orange, pink color, but in CA yes the typical white or tan are abundant. Ive never seen one in Utah, anyone got a picture?
Cheers
Brett