Europe 2014 - Lucerne Hike, Sailing Masts with Sculpture / The Rat Snake and the Radio

As we turned toward a wooded area I looked back and put the Big Cahoona in action, using the masts as a backdrop to this sculpture.  Many times I had to run to catch up with the girls, as they moved on while I was snapping away.
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During my first three semesters at SFA I lived in Dorm 16, run with an iron fist by a lady we called Ma Bradshaw.  It was a great place to live, and safer than most other dorms because of her no-nonsense style of management.  In spite of that, I managed to sneak in a few snakes as pets during my time there.

One of those was a huge Texas rat snake, more than five feet in length.  It was a wild one, caught in Bonita Creek down the way from where the Rusk Mansion is.  I wore gloves when reaching down to pick it up because it would bite furiously, but once in my arms or around my neck it settled down and the gloves came off.  Quite the conversation piece.

I was always the last to leave my dorm when a semester was over, because my family wasn't nearby and I wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere.  Therefore I was virtually alone on my floor at the end of the fall semester in 1978, working on the last of a twig collection for my dendrology class (being a forestry major at the time).  To make the evening more interesting I let the snake out to have the run of the room for a while.

After securing the underside of the door with a towel and making sure there were no holes or unnoticed passageways for it to crawl into, I let it out.  Rat snakes love to climb, so first thing it climbed up the bookcase, stretching its full length to get to the top.  After being there a bit it came down, supposedly to check out a possible route of escape.  Rat snakes are fast, so it had the room covered in no time.  During all of this I was sitting at my desk working on the final touches of mounting my twigs.  After about fifteen minutes it crawled up on my desk and settled down next to the wall a couple of feet from where I was working.  So far nothing really strange or out of the ordinary.

But then something happened.  Suddenly - THWACK!! - he struck across the desk and bit a portable radio I had turned up on the other side of the desk, lightning fast, then collected itself back against the wall.  I thought, "Well, haven't seen that before", then went back to my project.

After about another minute THWACK!, and again after about another fifteen seconds THWACK!  The same thing...striking across the width of my desk, passing just a few inches from of my working hands, biting the radio in the same spot.

Now I'm thinking that this is unusual, wondering what could make a snake want to strike at and bite a radio in the first place, not to mention in succession like that.  Then it dawned on me that, since snakes "hear" via vibrations perceived underneath the chin and through the jawbone, this guy was capturing the vibrations from the music (country, the slow and twangy kind), striking only when certain bass notes came from the speaker.  I watched a while and sure enough, it only struck when a song hit those bass notes - completely ignoring me in the whole process.  Fearing that it would injure itself before long, I turned off the radio and there were no more THWACKS to distract me from my work.