David Jolkovski/Larson Newspapers
Red Rock State Park has a brand new scaly face greeting folks within the customer middle as of Sunday, Oct. 29.
Cosmos, a Sonoran gopher snake sick that was acquired by the native nonprofit Sonoran Reptiles, is now an envoy animal on everlasting show on the park with the plan for the grownup — in all probability feminine — snake to turn out to be part of the park’s academic programming.
“I’m a big reptile and plant person. She’s named after a flower in the [sunflower] family,” Arizona State Parks and Trails ranger Sharon Maurer stated. “I am excited to have a snake for the park and I’m very passionate about educating people about venomous versus nonvenomous snakes. Because I know one reaction that many people have when they see a snake is they’re scared and they want to kill it. So I want to try and lessen some of that fear, so gopher snakes don’t get killed.”
The gopher snake is among the commonest snakes present in Arizona and on the North American continent, largely as a result of they’ll thrive in quite a lot of environments from deserts to forests. They have related coloring and patterning to rattlesnakes, which means that they’re generally misidentified as rattlesnakes. Gopher snakes have spherical pupils and lack the rattlesnake’s distinctive rattle and spade-shaped head. They can develop to be as much as 9 toes lengthy, however 4 toes is a extra frequent measurement.
“They’ll puff up their cheeks and turn their head like an arrow shape to mimic the shape of [a] rattlesnake’s head,” Sonoran Reptiles govt director Brett Smith stated. “They’ll start shaking their tail and rattling it and they’ll start hissing and the hissing sounds like a rattlesnake rattle.”
“Cosmos was initially taken from the wild to be somebody’s pet. She ended up getting sick.
Because the proprietor couldn’t correctly look after her, they surrendered her to Sonoran Reptiles,” park employees posted on Facebook.
“We’re a nonprofit organization based in the Sedona-Verde Valley area,” Smith stated. “We don’t have a physical location, but our board is all throughout the area. We do rescue, we take in animals, both native and non-native animals, and we do a lot of education.”
When they acquired Cosmos, she was affected by a respiratory illness and an unspecified parasitic an infection together with malnourishment. “[Her former owners] eventually noticed that their animals were deteriorating, and they couldn’t afford the vet bills,” Smith stated later, explaining why these situations additionally preclude Cosmos from being returned to the wild.
“[She’] been in captivity for quite a few years now,” Smith stated. “It’s hard to say [if she] will be able to hunt on [her] own again because she acts like a tame snake. She doesn’t really hunt for [her] food, she kind of grabs it gently and doesn’t grab it as if she’s hunting anything … Because of its illnesses, there’s a risk when you release a captive animal into the wild, that it’s going to spread captive-borne diseases or bacteria into wild populations.”
Sonoran Reptiles will stay the proprietor of the snake and maintain the required academic permits by the Arizona Game and Fish Department. The park can be answerable for Cosmos’ care and feeding; nevertheless, Sonoran Reptiles will present technical and well being care assist as wanted.
Smith added that a part of the message of Cosmos’ story is to not acquire snakes from the wild.
“It’s never a good idea to take an animal from the wild, especially if you don’t have any knowledge on how to take care of them,” he stated.
Sonoran Reptiles has acquired a number of native species that it has been unable to launch into the wild that at the moment are in academic packages.
“If it’s going to live in captivity, it’s nice to have it be able to educate people, and spread knowledge and understanding about the animals,” Smith stated. “It’s a cool way to get people interested in native wildlife by seeing something up close and experiencing it. [Which] gets people more excited. But it also opens up a window for them at the park to teach people about the difference between nonvenomous snakes that we have here and venomous snakes, and why you really shouldn’t mess with both.”
However, it will likely be some time earlier than guests will have the ability to maintain Cosmos.
“I have to get comfortable with her and she has to get comfortable with me before I can start doing interpretive programs with her and I have to make sure that she’s going to be okay with me holding her out in front of people,” Maurer stated.
