Sleeping Giant

Boo Boo sleeping. I never thought I’d like a chihuahua.

Salem is a Night Fury

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Acquiring Target.

Target Lock-On Achieved.

Mother!

Rejected.

Pretending to be sweet.

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Our Poor Pets on Halloween

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Hallowed Bean

 Spooky Dog

 Glamor Witch

 Boo Boo the joker.

 The Dread Pirate Layla

 ...dreads Halloween...

Her best Nefertiti impression.

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Salem the Cat

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We have a new kitten. Her name is Salem.

She is an adorable little girl.

 

 

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Gunnison River Bluffs Trail - Whitewater, CO

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 Looking out over the Gunnison River Bluffs

We took the trail to the left.

The scenery is pretty plain, until you get near the river.

Fall trees.

Railroad tracks.

Grand Mesa

Wildflowers

Boo Boo (AKA Smudgie), our little mountain goat.

Boo Boo headed back towards the trailhead.

View of the fall trees from the parking lot.

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Nagini the Garter Snake Fishing for Dinner

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Bad Sadie!

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On the kitchen table. She knows better. She's looking sassy.

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Nagini is getting bigger.

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Over the last few weeks, Naggie has eaten about 5 pinkie mice altogether. She continues to grow noticeably every day.

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"Nagini" the Garter Snake Tries Some New Food

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"Nagini" is a very young garter snake that we've had for four days now. We think that she is most likely a Western Terrestrial Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans).

The day after we caught Nagini, we successfully fed her some small, live feeder fish from a bowl full of water.  That was on Wednesday. Today (Friday) I tried feeding her some bits of a pinkie mouse. Using feeder tongs and just a little bit of movement, it didn't take long at all to get her to strike at this new food.

Based on the information that I have been able to find on the internet, pinkie mice are better than other food sources because they're free of parasites, mites and worms. Also, they provide complete nutrition to the garter snake, whereas other fish, amphibians, and worms are all deficient in some important way. For those reasons, I was glad that we could get our young snake to eat these pinkie bits very easily.

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Garter Snake in Grand Junction, CO

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A few days ago, I found a small garter snake when I was getting ready to do some weed eating in the yard. I'm still not sure exactly what species it is, but I think that it may be a very young Terrestrial Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans).

There is quite a bit of information about caring for young snakes, (i.e. what to feed them, how to feed them, how often, etc.) available on the internet. I'm going to post some pictures of this little creature and some of the better links that I've found to be the most helpful. I'll continue to add links to this post as I find them. 

www.Gartersnake.info has been one of the most helpful sites overall, and is a good starting point. 

So far, the snake that we found has eaten live feeder fish from a bowl of water. This is not the best food, as you'll find in the referenced websites, so we're going to try to get it to eat pinkie parts as soon as possible.

There are more links posted below the pictures. Check back in the future to see if new links have been added.

Here is a link to several good YouTube videos that show different ways to get very young garter snakes to eat ~ http://bit.ly/LmcXPn

The SnakeBytes TV channel on YouTube has several good generalized snake videos, and at least one which specifically deals with garter snakes ~ http://bit.ly/N3qTPz

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UPDATE #1

4 days after we caught this snake, we were able to get it to eat cut up bits of a pinkie mouse. We cut up the pinkie while it was still frozen, then thawed it out in a Ziploc bag placed into a bowl of lukewarm water.  There is a video of this first feeding available here ~ http://bit.ly/Q3FYCD

Reebok the Grand Junction Bullfrog

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Reebok was found on the road during a thunderstorm
early on the morning of June 28th, 2012.

Reebok is a male. There is an easy way to figure this out. The circles behind his eyes (the tympanum) are larger than his eyes. If it were a female, those circles would be smaller.

We decided to see if we could create a suitable temporary habitat for him. We bought all of the aquatic plants that you can see in the pond here for just $12 at Meadowlark Garden Center on Broadway in Grand Junction, but there is still plenty of work to do. I'd like to buy a floating log at Petsmart and another little plastic house that looks like a hollow tree stump for Reebok to shade in if he chooses. But for now, I think it looks pretty nice. I guess we'll have to see if Reebok even sticks around for more than one day.

This pond already gets quite a bit of shade from the surrounding trees, but we decided to try to create a little "frog house" for Reebok. I guess time will tell if he approves of this little shelter.

For the moment, he seems to be content with his new surroundings. Here he is luxuriating in a nice, froggy Colorado spa.  We watched YouTube videos showing us what bullfrogs eat and how to feed them. Based on that information, we bought ten goldfish feeders to start off with. We'll also try to feed him some other things like night crawlers, and even frozen mice (thawed of course).

At first, I was worried that Reebok wouldn't be able to jump out of the pond, since the plastic edges were higher than the water level. Several times this afternoon, he has proven that there is no reason to worry. He just sits near the side of the pond, and quickly hops back in whenever someone approaches.

Reebok

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Kiddens in the Morning Sun

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"Kiddens in moooornin' sun... 
I'll be Kiddens when the evenin' comes... 
Watchin that rabbit hop in. 
Then I watch it hop awaaaay again. 
MMMmmmm..."

( insert innocent sounding whistle here )

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Kiddens again, about an hour later.
He is a completely psychotic cat by the way.

Now he's watching a squirrel out back.

Relaxing after a long morning of hunting.

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Purr Bot - Shaman on the Mountain of Dreams

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Purr Bot was a big, scruffy black cat who would roll over and purr at your feet the moment he made eye contact. He could sit in a lap all day purring, and his purring was usually accompanied by copious amounts of drool. He had the most soulful eyes of any cat that I've ever known. It seemed as if he could look directly into me, read my thoughts and know my heart. He had more love to give than any animal I've ever met.

About ten years ago, Purr Bot was thrown out of a car onto a busy street right in front of me. I stopped my truck, he ran under it, and then he jumped into my arms and starting purring loudly first thing. We've been together ever since. From Georgia, to California, to Louisiana, and finally Colorado... he's been my constant companion when everything around me was constantly changing.

It turns out that he was with me throughout almost all of my philosophical transformation and "growing up." He watched me go from an unhappy place to the happiest I've ever been, from being bound in military chains to becoming a free civilian, from someone who was simply "playing the game," to someone who is truly living and who has found true love.

During my personal transformation, whenever the Universe was trying to tell me something of real significance through my dreams, it chose Purr-Bot in the form of a cat-man avatar to convey its message. He became the shaman on the mountain, the being who held the keys to knowledge and the divine. To me, the real-life Purr Bot became something of a supernatural incarnation, a fuzzy, purring icon of The Great Mystery.

When I was a kid, one of only two cassette tapes I was allowed to play "without asking" was Jim Croce's "Photographs and Memories." If you had asked me back then (when I was about 9 years old) what song I identified with most, I would have definitely said "I've Got a Name." Somehow it just embodied me as I wanted to be.

This morning as I was driving back from dropping my fiancee off at work, I was looking at the beautiful fall trees and the bright blue sky, thinking of how lucky I was to have shared more than a decade with such a great pet. I was remembering the moment that Purr Bot and I first met, when he was just a sick black kitten that someone had thrown into a busy intersection. Just as I was envisioning that initial meeting, this song came on the radio. In my mind, it came straight from that silly cat. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcqauC49Xmc

So long good buddy. You were the silliest, most loving, purest soul in cat-form that I've met so far in this lifetime. You were just the first of many simple, strange, and wonderful miracles that blessed my life during the time that we were together.

You were quite a character in real life, and the shaman in my dreams. Maybe we'll meet in that dreamland again sometime. Thank you for choosing me to share this lifetime of yours. Hopefully, your soul is purring somewhere safe and warm right now.

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