When it comes to viewing wildlife in person, timing is everything. There’s a great big world out there and the chances of you being in the exact right spot at the ideal time are slim to none. My camera traps provide me with constant proof that animals are moving throughout the environment during all hours of the day and night, but without that proof I wouldn’t know it. The majority of my time spent in the wild is time spent alone.
Every now and then, after many concurrent trips without seeing any interesting wildlife, I’ll have a day where the timing just works out. Oddly enough, when one of those days is about to occur, I can sometimes feel it. Just the other day as I drove down a forested road on my way to set up and review some camera traps and I thought to myself, ‘You’re going to see something great today.’ I wasn’t sure what it was going to be, but then I had a flash of a cat sprawled out, sleeping on the branch of a big tree. I thought, ‘Great. Today’s the day that I see an ocelot or puma or, God forbid, a jaguar sleeping in a tree.’
With that thought in my mind, I rounded a corner and came upon a buck, a male white-tailed deer, with a set of big antlers. To me this was confirmation that my timing was on point. As he bounded across the road and into the forest, I continued around the corner and made eye contact with a visibly upset bearded guy holding a camera with a big lens. It appeared that I had just ruined his photo of the buck. I felt a little bad, but this day was about my good timing, not that guy’s bad timing.
After successfully deploying a camera trap, I entered a long trail deep into the forest on my way to review a camera that had been out there a few weeks. As I walked, I noticed a section of trail up ahead where the sun was shining on a small tree that had fallen across the trail. As I approached, I saw a thick tan snake retreat from the sunny area into the shaded brush on the side of the trail.
More good timing. It was one of the biggest blacktail cribos I had ever seen. As I stepped over the log, a juvenile black spiny-tailed iguana hopped onto the trail and took off. It seemed as though my good timing worked out well for the young iguana. If I hadn’t scared off the snake, it probably would have been lunch.
Eventually I reached my camera and swapped out SD cards and AA batteries. It was time to walk back to the truck. I had a few hours before I had to be at the kids’ school to pick them up, so I decided to take a detour. There was a secondary route back that took a little longer, but the trail was lined with huge trees. These trees have big thick branches that seem like a perfect place to see a wild cat napping.
I walked along the trail slowly, peering up into the branches of the trees. At one point I noticed a particularly large and interesting tree twenty or so meters off the trail. I walked over to get a better look. Unfortunately, it lacked the sleeping resident I was after but there was another big tree thirty meters deeper into the forest that appeared to hang out over a little gorge that seemed like it needed a closer inspection. As I stepped through some vines and approached the base of the tree, there was an explosion of movement and noise.
I froze and felt my adrenaline spike. At the base of the tree, three meters from where I stood, a huge Central American rattlesnake was raising the top third of its body a foot off of the ground and was buzzing its rattle intensely. We stood and looked at each other for a few seconds. I knew the body posture and rattling was a defensive response, so it probably wasn’t going to come at me.
Even so, I took a second to clock the best escape route where I wouldn’t get hung up in the vines I had just squeezed through. After a few more seconds, the snake began to calm down slightly, and I thought I should grab my phone and get a video of this thing. I shot a perfectly centered video of the big, beautiful snake rattling its tail at me, even taking the time to zoom in a little. The snake then moved around the trunk of the large tree and disappeared.
I wondered if the tree had a cavity at the base that the snake had retreated into, so I looped around the tree to see. There was a big hole at the base of the tree and when the snake saw me a second time, it again reared up and started rattling aggressively. I shot a quick second video and decided not to press my luck and got out of there. Talk about timing! I thought my good timing was going to show me a cat in a tree but instead I got rattlesnake in a tree hole.
When I finally arrived at the truck, I got out my phone, eager to review my videos and share them with everyone that I knew that loved snakes. The second video was decent, a little off center and the snake was a little difficult to see in the hole, but overall fine. The first video was … one second long. The video that would have shown the full snake in all of its reared up, rattling glory never got recorded. I was so jacked up with adrenaline that I must have pushed the buttons wrong.
I must admit that I’m a little heartbroken that I messed up the video, but I still appreciate the amazing timing it took for me to be in the right place at the right time. Maybe I’ll see it again when I carefully return to place a camera trap at the tree hole. If that camera records the snake, I’ll share it with the world. Until then enjoy the second (not nearly as amazing as the first) cell phone video below.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica.
