Suizo Report -- Thanks and July 2013

Howdy Herpers,                                                                                                               07/31/13

Thank you cards are slugging their way toward the nine kind souls who gave our fiscal situation a jump start. Thanks to their efforts, we can not only keep the animals in the game that we have, but also add a few more. I do not wish to embarrass anybody by mentioning names here. Just know that when the acks are presented, your names will be enshrined. And that ought to add numerous zeros to your paychecks, open the gates of heaven for you and yours, and massively improve your love lives.

As for the rest of you--see what you missed? But it's never too late!

Ok, enough with the BS.

On the evening of 3 July, Typing Boy here was tracking  our pregnant female CM17. This was one of those rare nights when Marty Feldner was at my side, instead of being on the other side of the hills mowing down a line of snakes. Whenever we track together, Marty lets me track. There is no sense in him doing the tracking, as he'll leave me in his dust. So he happily weaves a herpetological tapestry around me as we move. Typing Boy was following the path of least resistance, following the cattle trails that line the berm of an arroyo that flows from the bowels of a slot canyon. Marty was a couple climate zones above me, when he yells down to me: "Got a hatchling tortoise."

Tortoises of any size will cause a break from tracking, but all the more so for hatchlings. Sluggo made his way upslope to view the find.

Sure enough, once I gave pause to forcibly eject some black lung tissue shaken loose from the arduous climb, I saw Marty's hatchling tortoise.

Its head was up, one foreleg poised as if to take the next step. We both took several photos, marveling over how cooperative the little gogger was being. At some point later, Marty morphed into a poopsock by proclaiming "I think it's dead." Inspired by this statement, I gave it a poke with my walking stick. This did nothing to disturb the status quo, not to mention the tortoise. The poopsock was correct, the little gogger was quite dead.

A couple of strands of spider web were strung across its head, and one of the strands had also snagged its right forelimb. We eventually broke the hapless thing out of the web, noting that the strands had the tensile strength of thin steel wire. There is only one spider that spins webs like that in these parts--the black widow.

The most likely cause of death is that it was merely stuck, and baked its brains out in the sun. There were some signs of trauma to the head, which could have been from a bite. In any case, this event has stumped many a tortoise Jedi. There is more info that could be shared--but I won't.

Marty and I WILL go Hollywood with this observation, and reveal the rest therein. (If I do it here, all chance of a natural history note dies. Why publish it here--where people will actually read it?)

That, my friends, is what image 1 is all about. Cool--huh?

As most of the images are labeled, it makes no sense for me to beat them to death with lengthy descriptions. A few highlights include our newest male tiger CT16 with rain drops on his coiled form, the shed skin of an atrox that looks very much like a living snake, one of the neonate tigers shown in our last missive at its release site, and the face of God closes this missive.














Best to all, roger