Feral Cities Read Free Page A

they get shocked because they are not from here. They are shocked, shocked, that there is a snake in Arizona.”
    They’re not alone, or even the worst. One time a lady called Bryan because a hawk was in a tree. “She was the perfect mix of town, animals, and ignorance all in a bundle.” It seems as if people have a mental block when it comes to urban wildlife. We move to the city and expect it to be free of bugs, snakes, carnivores, and just about everything else too. Even, it seems, when the land right next to our homes is untamed desert.
    Snakes show up all over the Phoenix area, though, not just on the edge of deserts. A couple of days before I arrived, Bryan picked up a diamondback from the parking lot of a hotel in downtown Scottsdale. “He had been living in this hotel parking lot for years and years. The gardeners say they’ve seen him numerous times. He didn’t rattle, didn’t bother anyone and then one day they were like you’ve got to get rid of him. I don’t know what to do with him. I can’t put him in the desert—he is old, he’ll just crawl around and die, and no one wants him as a pet because he is a big, old, ugly diamondback. He is old and crusty and his color is fading.”
    Then there was the hot tub. “It was in the spring. The guy opened his tub for the first time since winter and there’s a gopher snake lying half in, half out of the hot water. I got there an hour later and he was still lounging in there, like ‘Yeah? What do you want? I’m in the hot tub.’ I felt bad taking him out of there. He seemed pretty happy.”
    Hot tub snakes aren’t that unusual. “In the summer I get calls in the night from super-drunk people, really drunk people, who’ve gone out to the hot tub. A lot of almost successful dates people have had have been interrupted by a snake in the hot tub.”
    Rattlesnakes tend to be found close to desert parks, but sometimes they end up in more urban places. “There’s this one area where there are still rattlesnakes that come in from the desert deep into the city because there’s this old drainage canal,” says Bryan. “If it rains there are these torrential floods that just go through the city, and that’s when these diamondbacks get washed into those neighborhoods.”
    For the most part, though, it’s the gopher and king snakes that have really taken to the city. “King snakes especially, they love golf courses. The snakes that are more generalist than the rattlesnakes do well at adapting to the city. Gopher snakes and king snakes can be found throughout the city. I’ve caught them in downtown Phoenix.
    â€œSome of them do better in the city than they do in the wild. In Paradise Valley there are consistently larger, healthier, and older gopher snakes than out in the desert because they are eating roof rats and living in these lush backyards and swimming in the pools. They are doing pretty good there.”
    Another city success is the night snake. “They get into pipes a lot, so if someone in the middle of the city calls me and says there is a snake on their bathroom counter, I know exactly what it is,” says Bryan. “It’s weird because they are specialists but they’ve figured out how to live in the town very well. They eat lots of bugs, and in the city there’s new, exciting bugs like cockroaches and crickets for them to eat. They also do well because there’s no predation pressure.”
    Phoenix’s city parks, which by and large are just patches of preserved desert surrounded by buildings, also work well for snakes. “The snakes that are there are eating the rats that are eating the granola, garbage, and rotting bananas that hikers throw on the ground.”

    After releasing the western diamondback we head to Anthem, where Bryan’s booked to check a house for rattlesnakes. Fifteen years ago, Anthem consisted of