What Rattlesnakes Do During Record Spring Heat

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Here he goes. There's another rattlesnake.

[00:00:05]Isn't that weird? Because I thought rattlesnakes were coldblooded and they are always looking for warmth and they want to be hot and that's not what that means actually.

[00:00:20]Hey everybody, it is currently the hottest day ever recorded in March in Arizona. Uh, that means right now in Cave Creek where I'm leaving, it is currently 103° and it's warmer than that down in Phoenix. It's about 1,000 ft below me and it's only going to get warmer in the next few days. So, we don't know what snakes are going to be doing in this.

[00:00:41]And it's not always so simple as, oh, it's warmer. Snakes are going to come out like people think. A lot of times, unusually warm temperatures can actually cause snakes to hide uh rather than come out. So, we have no idea, and there's only one way to go find out. So, uh, this might shock you that this is what I'm doing with my evening, but I'm going to go look for snakes. And I'm also going to be looking for hila monsters.

[00:01:05]And right now, the conditions feel a lot like how they would be in mid to late May when hila monsters are very active.

[00:01:15]So, I wouldn't expect to see some out in the evening right now normally, but I'm going to pretend I'm pushing fast forward a couple of months. And who knows, maybe I'll see something. And if you're still watching this, spoiler alert, it means I found something. Or else I would have just thrown this clip away cuz there's no video to watch. So, I guess we'll find out what it is together.

[00:01:41]It is still really hot, so we're going to take a little walk in a shaded area.

[00:01:46]I don't think anything's going to be out crossing the road yet. Uh we'll see.

[00:01:49]Also, uh my mouth is all red. I'm fine.

[00:01:52]and I just was eating a bunch of hot tamali. So, all right, let's go find something. So, you might have been thinking when I'm talking about rattlesnakes not wanting to be out because it's too hot still in March that isn't that weird because I thought rattlesnakes were cold-blooded and they are always looking for warmth and they want to be hot. And that's not what what that means actually. Cold-blooded animal, it's not really cold blood. It just means that they can't regulate their own body temperature through their metabolism like we can. They need outside forces to be able to do that.

[00:02:26]And it doesn't mean that they want to be hot. It means that they want to be in the right temperature and they need to move around and regulate that kind of manually. So on days like today when it's really hot and the ground is probably you know 120 130° that is lethally hot for a snake to be out where snakes are not looking for warmth.

[00:02:48]They're not always looking to be hot. I mean they are if they're cold and they're trying to warm themselves up and they're not looking for warmth. They're looking for stability. They're looking to avoid losing their moisture. But in Arizona getting hot is not all that hard to do. And a lot of their energy, in fact, maybe even most of it, is spent avoiding excess heat than it is trying to gain it.

[00:03:13]And that is one of the reasons why it's really interesting what the snakes might be doing right now is because we just don't know what they'd be doing in these really hot conditions. So, normally March and much of April are these really safe times where the snakes can go out and they can kind of take chances, spend a lot of time on the surface, uh, travel to new areas that they're going to go spend a lot of time courting and and mating and, uh, all the social activity around. All that requires a lot of time on the surface. And when it starts getting in these kind of conditions that seem more like late May, they're probably pinned down. They're probably not as active as they normally would.

[00:03:48]So, I don't really know. And check it out. There's a velvet ant. It's not really an ant. It's like a terrestrial wasp that doesn't have wings. And has a very long stinger that uh is supposed to cause pretty excruciating pain. So don't don't touch it like everything out here.

[00:04:08]Okay. I didn't see anything hiking, so we'll get back to uh being on the road.

[00:04:13]Still 103° outside.

[00:04:16]Yeah, it's one of those days that I love getting out anytime I can, but some of these times where you just feel like you've set yourself up for failure, you know, start thinking about I could be watching a movie right now.

[00:04:30]I mean, it would still not be as nice as this, though.

[00:04:35]Well, I'm way up on a hill and let me show you what I just almost hit with my car cuz I wasn't expecting it.

[00:04:46]What are you doing up here, little one?

[00:04:51]This little young male uh going up the hill. Were you just down there where I was just hiking?

[00:04:58]Okay.

[00:05:00]Well, let's hurry along cuz I mean there's not many cars here. But so this is a behavior some people could interpret as chase sometimes too cuz it's not going away from me. It's going sideways and it's going towards that bush. So, this is sometimes people see this as like it's coming for me. Um, and they don't realize that part of that coming for me behavior requires them to be uh walking alongside the snake, escorting it or doing things that aren't leaving it alone.

[00:05:30]Kind of funny. I saw someone on one of the Facebook groups today uh do that.

[00:05:34]saying that the snake came snake came right after him and uh it's super aggressive and he had it in a in a jar and he was like poking at it. Let's go up the hill, dude. Put me in a jar. I'm going to be aggressive, too.

[00:05:49]People are funny. Even though it's really hot, stuff might be active.

[00:05:57]He's all upset. I should clarify that cuz I said something that I I don't like when I say this. I don't like it when anybody says this and I think it's something that we need to really start working on stamping out of our uh discussion about snakes. A snake is not well I guess it is upset but some of that anthropomorphic um attribution of of emotions is is kind of an inaccurate way of describing it.

[00:06:25]So you know a snake that is acting like that is being defensive. It's not really it's not upset. It's not angry.

[00:06:33]certainly not angry. Uh it's it's terrified. It's defensive. It thinks it's going to die. It thinks that it's like this close to death and it's just just trying to do everything it can to to preserve its life.

[00:06:50]Gopher snake on the road, but there's a car trying to pass. So, I hope it hurries up cuz I want to look at this gopher snake.

[00:06:59]He didn't even see what he drove by.

[00:07:02]It's this. Look at this beautiful big sonor and gopher snake. See what he's doing? He's triangulating his head.

[00:07:11]He's going to do this. And watch. If I get close, he's going to he's going to let me have it.

[00:07:19]There he poops his head out like that.

[00:07:22]Here he goes.

[00:07:27]That's it.

[00:07:29]All right. Maybe he's not going to bite.

[00:07:33]If I touch him, he probably will.

[00:07:36]Let's get you where you're going.

[00:07:39]It's not that it's venomous, obviously.

[00:07:41]I just don't like being bitten by anything. If I can help it, and I want to help him off the road because So, I want him to flee away from the road so the car doesn't hit him on the Okay. Okay. Let's go down the hill, buddy.

[00:07:56]Come on. Go down. to escape down instead of on the road.

[00:08:03]There, there's a hole. Okay.

[00:08:06]So, why didn't I just pick it up if it's not uh venomous? It isn't going to hurt me. Um I don't like having any kind of cuts in my hands. That's it.

[00:08:19]Uh yeah, I don't I don't want to be bitten by anything. Why would I? So, I moved that gopher snake off with a hook and it's good. I'm just glad that that car didn't hit it. So, I'm glad stuff's moving. I mean, it's really interesting.

[00:08:31]I thought I was kind of thinking that stuff would be really suppressed, but so far it's not even dark yet, and I've seen two snakes out on the road. So, there's another rattlesnake.

[00:08:42]Where you going, dude? There's like a cliff right there.

[00:08:45]I got to move before that car gets here cuz he's going to come back.

[00:08:54]Very expensive. Hot snake.

[00:09:02]Look at all these boulders and stuff.

[00:09:03]That's what he was for the day.

[00:09:07]Okay, go hide. We'll try again later.

[00:09:10]Just get you get you out of here before that car comes back. All right, that's more snakes than I was expecting. Three of them before dark.

[00:09:22]There's another snake. Let's check it out. And I also saw that car leave. So hopefully he didn't run over anybody. It's another diamond back. This one is a little different than the other ones cuz this one is a female.

[00:09:37]See, has a shorter tail on it.

[00:09:40]And okay, so that's always interesting is I want to go across the road where it was going so it doesn't try to go back.

[00:09:46]But look, it's it just wants to go back where it came from. So this is I can give a good demonstration of here what people might think when they like it's coming right for me. It's chasing me. So I'm standing here. It's not. It just wants to go by me. So if I encountered this snake in the road over here and was messing around with it, then yeah, it could look like the snake is coming towards you. But that's all it wants is to for you to leave basically. Let's go.

[00:10:10]All right. I think it's going to be okay if it goes back. It'll just try again in a little while. Um, there's really no traffic down here at all, thankfully.

[00:10:19]That's one good thing about it being hot is the, you know, people don't like hanging out when it's super hot either.

[00:10:25]But I guess the snakes are not having a problem with it whatsoever. All right, let's keep going. That's three rattlesnakes and a gopher snake.

[00:10:35]So, interestingly, after that flurry of activity, which really only uh happened within one and a half passes of this road, um it seems to have concluded.

[00:10:47]I've done two more passes since then, and I haven't seen uh anything on it.

[00:10:52]So, it's now full dark. So, I'm going to head back out of here and start working my way um back just to see. So, I don't want to see dead snakes on the road on that big paved stretch. I have about 20 miles of pavement to drive on to get out of here. Um, but it's still useful information because all those animals that were trying to cross the road and unfortunately didn't make it. Um, those were all still saying that there was something that was moving. Let's see if we see anything else.

[00:11:22]Uh, so I'm home and uh after leaving and seeing all those snakes in that short amount of time, I drove almost almost 25 miles to get back here on paved roads and I saw one dead diamond bag. So that's what it looks like is that in these temperatures, uh, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then I don't know, 30 minutes of a bunch of activity and then nothing. So that's interesting. Never seen that in March before. You know, it's it's two night. It's very much like what I saw last night. It's not enough information to draw any uh big conclusions over it, but you know, it's something. And if this happens again, I might know a little bit more about what to expect.

[00:12:01]So, uh anyway, I'm going to go and I don't know, go do something else. See you.