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Aquatic Varmints Beware Arizona's Most Rapacious Reptile: the Garter Snake

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom and trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down.

From the poem "Snake," in D.H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

In the mountains of eastern Arizona lurks a killer snake. A silent stalker with scales. Voracious and cutthroat, he surprises the unwary. Say hello to a sucker fish's worst nightmare Arizona's most rapacious reptile - the wandering garter snake.

For most of us, if someone mentions snakes and Arizona in the same breath, frightening visions of fangs, rattles, and the grim reaper quicken our pulse, and our palms begin to sweat. The conversation turns into a series of one-breath nervous recollections of "I nearly stepped on a six-foot diamondback, but I jumped back just in time." "And have you ever seen a sidewinder?" "Did you know Mojaves could kill you quicker than diamondbacks?"

And now, thanks to Richard Webb's photographs of a wandering garter snake stalking, drowning, and swallowing an unsuspecting sucker fish, the first nervous thought of snakes and Arizona may not be of the infamous rattlesnake but the innocuous garter Webb, raised in the mountains of eastern Arizona, has had enough snake experiences to make you think he's kin to St. Patrick, but nothing prepared him for what he witnessed one day along a creek below the Mogollon Rim.

While returning to his car after boulder-hopping up and down one of the Rim's hidden canyons, he and his brother found themselves in the middle of a life and death struggle. Not between themselves and a surprised rattler but a scene right out of Walt Disney's The Living Desert, a documentary in which the balance of nature hinges on an animal's position along the food chain.

Like the scene in the movie of the battle between the rattlesnake and the mouse, Webb's photography provides us with a rare look at a startling dance of death between wandering garter snakes and desert fish. The desert sucker fish, Catostomus clarki, can be found in the watersheds of the Gila, Salt, Verde, and Bill Williams rivers. Sunning in the sands of streams between snacks of algae and insect larvae, the sucker fish makes his favorite home in shady, out-of-the-way gravel-bottomed pools. An adult may grow to 13 inches, but the specimen Webb witnessed had matured to onlyabout five inches. The wandering garter snake, Thamnophis elegans vagrans, one of 72 serpent species in the state, roams the banks of eastern Arizona's mountain streams in search of aquatic prey. Not particular about his meals, the wandering garter enjoys a smorgasbord of salamanders and worms, frogs and fish, ambushing the water creatures from rocky hiding places, shoreline retreats, and poolside perches. This mountain serpent may be harmless to man, but in the water world, from stream banks in British Columbia to creeks in western Oklahoma, T. e. vagrans has the reputation of a killer. According to Webb, the twofoot striped snake positioned itself in a narrow spot above a sandy, gravel-bottomed pool. Lying in wait, its head saliently positioned, the wandering garter stiffened as it sensed movement in the water below. The oblivious sucker fish, seeking solace in a corner of the creek, never saw the snake. In a yellow and black checkerboard flash, the snake had the fish in its maw, and the battle began. Commend the sucker for fighting back, squirming for its life, but it never had a chance. Like an alligator with its prey, the garter dragged the fish to the bottom of the pool. When out of breath, the snake maintaining its viselike grip surfaced long enough to gain a snootful of air and sank to the bottom once more, drowning the fish in its own home.

After its prey stopped moving, the wandering garter then moved out of the pool very slowly, finding a position in which to prop the lifeless sucker fish and leverage it into its ever-widening mouth. In less than 15 minutes, the garter had swallowed the fish.

Quiet descended on the streamside scene. Satisfied, "stuffed to the gills," the wandering garter snake lay still, the tail of its victim unceremoniously sticking out from its jaws. Webb and his brother stood in awe. "That was one smart snake," he concluded. Jeb Stuart Rosebrook is the magazine's research editor. He lives in Phoenix. Over the years, Richard K. Webb has had many encounters with snakes, but none were more interesting than this one.