![]() ![]() In his blogpost, Hughes also shared this video of a western diamondback he flushed at night just last week, which began hoisting itself up a tree in apparent response to the inadvertent disturbance: In some instances, in particular with black-tailed rattlesnakes and speckled rattlesnakes, they are moving in trees with numerous birds and arboreal mammals, and I assumed they were moving into a position to hunt them." "However, more often they are actively moving. "Of the rattlesnakes that I have seen higher in trees, above eye-level, stationary snakes in an apparent ambush position to hunt birds," he said. But some of the rattlers he’s spotted in trees may have been seeking prey. He told me by email that most of these sightings were of rattlesnakes loosely coiled in lower boughs during the hot desert summer, when an arboreal basking perch likely helps the snakes keep cool. In a blogpost addressing the recent flurry of stories about climbing rattlers, Hughes wrote that he’s seen multiple rattlesnake species in trees in the American Southwest (the centre of diversity, along with northern Mexico, for these New World pit vipers): besides western diamondbacks, also black-tailed, speckled, tiger, and banded rock rattlers. Hughes is an amateur field herpetologist and the founder of Rattlesnake Solutions ("We like snakes so you don’t have to"), which relocates rattlesnakes from homes and yards across Arizona and installs specialised rattlesnake fences.
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