Gardening Update, July 29th – the snake that plays dead

Landscape bed gardening tends to be mostly mundane work, pulling weeds and grass, trimming over-growth, spreading mulch.  One of the rewards of this work is surprise discoveries of interesting things that are easily overlooked by those not getting their hands dirty.  Today’s surprise was finding a small snake that seemed ill.  Alerting my fellow gardeners, we all watched as the little Red-bellied snake wiggled around weakly, showed us his bright orange belly and then appeared to expire.  It was an almost convincing act, but I suspected a trick.  Sure enough, after we moved to another area of the CCC Museum garden, the little trickster came back to life, only to repeat the act for us when we came to check on it.  This behavior is well described at animaldiversity.org.   It’s the kind of thing that keeps us coming back to see what other surprises are out there.