Greg Basham

Greg sent me some stories and photos about his experiences with Rattlesnakes and other herps in San Diego County. Here is what he has to say about himself. Below you can read about some of his excursions.

I am the regular guy that always loved reptiles and amphibians since childhood. I have been keeping them all of my life (32 years). Once I moved out of mom and dad's house I went crazy and had a veritable zoo! I have always been interested in rattlesnakes and started keeping them in captivity way too early. At one time I was licensed by the California Department of Fish and Game to keep up to forty rattlesnakes at a time for isolation and relocation. That was an interesting time in my life. I lived in a double wide trailer that was packed wall to wall with cages of rattlesnakes, monitor lizards, rats, and mice. Once I got married though, that was all out the window. No more pet reptiles and definately no more rodents!! I'll always be an amateur herpetologist with or without the animals. The photo trips and hikes are a way for me to get back with the animals, but not have to take them home and maintain them.

To start with, here is a longnosed snake I photographed. this is the most vividly colored one I've ever come across.

Coastal Phase Ruber

This picture is one I took while relocating a very nice Red Diamond Rattlesnake. For a two year period I was "on call" by most of the North San Diego County Fire Departments to handle their snake calls. A lot of the "macho" firefighters got the willies from snakes and they gladly passed the calls on to me. That's okay with me - I don't like fire. The fire departments response to a snake call was not good for the snake - they always killed the snake if it was a rattlesnake. I understood that they were not trained or experienced in handling rattlesnakes, but it was still a terrible waste. Many of the calls were for harmless snakes (usually gopher snakes that the caller KNEW was a rattler), but the majority of them were legitimate rattlesnake calls. I even responded once to a call where a woman's dog had been bitten by a reported rattlesnake and she had left to take her dog to the vet. I located the snake, right where I was told it would be, and identified it for the vet as a very large Southern Pacific Rattlesnake. I never heard what happened to the dog.

Anyways, this picture is of a large Red Diamond Rattlesnake (my favorite) being released after being removed during a snake call. The ruber has alway been my favorite rattlesnake. The snakes found in the coastal areas seem to be much more nicely colored with brick reddish markings than the inland and desert snakes. The inlands appear more drab and the desert rubers have very little red to them at all when compared to a nice coastal specimen like this one. I am sure that the colors vary from locale to locale, but the above has been my experience.

Speckled Rattlesnakes near Fallbrook

Both of these Speckled Rattlesnakes were found on a Spring hike in a remote area of North San Diego County near Fallbrook. I have been hiking in this spot for years and on each trip I have come across at least one Speckled Rattlesnake. On this particular trip I took a friend and his two teen aged kids hiking with me. They were very excited at the possibility of coming across a real live rattlesnake. They didn't have to wait long. After parking our car we beagn walking to the usual rock piles and formations that always produce Speckleds. We weren't on the trail for five minutes when I had to tell the kids to "stop!". I had seen the rattlesnake coming out of the brush and onto the fire break we were walking on. I quickly took a photograph of the snake and then used my snake hook to move the snake onto the trail so the kids could see it's beauty better. The movement excited the snake and it began to rattle. The kids were screaming - they loved it. I took the other two photgraphs and we were back on our way to the rocks. I'm sure the snake was glad were we leaving. The kids were electrified now, looking into every bush and watching where they placed their feet on each step. Neither of them had actually seen and heard a live rattlesnake in the wild before and they wanted to find more. We reached the "Honey Hole" rock pile and were not disappointed. We found another Speckled sunning itself in a resting coil between some rocks near the top of the formation. I took a couple photographs of this animal and left it to be. The snake never moved during the few minutes we were watching it. We checked a few of the cracks in the rock slabs and saw two more Speckleds in them. Unfortunately, they were well beyond the reach of my camera. There was a spiny lizard basking on every rock with a good view. We began the twenty minute hike back to the car and arrived at just about dusk. The kids couldn't stop talking about how neat it was to see the snakes and were already planning the next trip.

The snakes we encountered on this trip seemed typical for this area. All have been adults, usually between 30 - 40 inches long and always well fed with thick bodies. There are lots of rodent burrows and nests in and around the rocks to keep them fat. The color of the granite rock in this area varies from a light orange to grey and so does the color pattern for the Speckleds found in the area. It has been my experience that these Speckleds are mild mannered and will often not even rattle when lifted on a hook. However, they can get right mean if you try to wrestle them out of their rocks or crevasse. Of course, no rattlesnake should be handled or captured by anyone who is not adequately trained and responsible.

Other reptiles encountered in the area have been king snakes, gopher snakes, whip snakes, horned lizards, whiptails, and skinks. I have been told that Rosy Boas are also common in the area, but I have never come across one.

Tarantula Hawk with prey

The tarantula hawk dragging the tarantula was also found in this area as I was driving through one day. I stopped my car and broke out the camera once I realized what I had seen. I felt like Marlin Perkins in Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom when I was shooting that. That was a unique find.