‘They’re in the dang trees’: Dancing rattlesnake strikes fear from above, video shows

Is there no safe quarter from the seemingly persistent encroach of the slithering, scaly, mean old rattlesnake?

Everywhere you turn this summer, there’s a new snake video to watch.

But, of course, it’s not that we’re being overrun. Human development is colliding over and over again with the habitats of a great multitude of creatures, including snakes, and, we’re doing it while equipped with pocket-sized super-cameras, so you do the math.

The latest case-in-point was a frightening one for hunting enthusiast Frank Gonzales.

He told McClatchy that he was out scouting hunting ground in southwestern New Mexico last month, in preparation for the opening of deer season, when he saw something out of the corner of his eye.

“I had stepped on a rattlesnake on a hunting trip last year, so my eyes were trained to the ground, making sure that didn’t happen again,” the 33-year-old from Las Cruces said. “Then I saw this thing up in the leaves, swinging back and forth. At first I thought it was a piece of string the wind had taken up there.”

But when he moved closer to the swinging, swaying strand, he came to a startling realization. This was no mere piece of string.

It was a rattlesnake, between 5 and 6 feet long, Gonzalez said — fangs and all, doing some sort of snake dance while coiled around the branches above his head.

“It’s scary enough to have them on the ground,” he told McClatchy. “But now they’re in the dang trees.”

He posted a video of the tree snake to Facebook shortly after getting the heck away from under the rattler. It has been viewed more than 256,000 times and shared more than 5,100 times.

Snake experts say rattlesnakes can climb trees, as Gonzales documented, but that they rarely do it. Ecologist P.J. Perea, of the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, told the Hilton Head Island Packet that it’s odd for a rattler to make its way up into a tree as high as the one Gonzales ran into.

But they’re also “opportunistic” predators, Perea told the newspaper. Maybe they’re up there looking for a nice egg-based or baby bird dinner.

One Facebook commenter on Gonzalez’ post thought the snake might have been dropped there by a bird of prey. But Gonzales said the snake didn’t appear to be wounded.

The “why” may remain a mystery, but for Gonzales, the frightening sight is enough to make him look twice before taking shade under a tree anytime soon, he said.

This story was originally published September 6, 2018 at 5:55 PM.