Mapping the Social Lives of Rattlesnakes

The skies of Buckhorn Flat in Utah’s San Rafael Swell embrace and enthrall, swelter and sway, providing the magic necessary for any place sacrificed to industrial capitalism to experience daily renewal. For many years, I told naysayers that the northern Swell holds unassuming beauty; you just have to be there and be still for a spell. What I hadn’t considered was the dark beauty of the underground, even though traces lurk above.

A drive in my fossil-fueled truck down into Buckhorn Canyon feels like the beginning of a descent. Not many humans travel into the bowels of the earth, but many species reside there. Of these species, we seem to know little.

Managing half of their lives in the upper realms where we move about and the other half doing god-knows-what underground, rattlesnakes are one of our most enigmatic counterparts. They are icons of desert culture with abilities to eat infrequently, reduce their respiration when water availability is low, and scarify seeds from rodent mouths in their intestinal tracts. They are also social creatures with generational knowledge that spans millions of years of continental climate change.

We humans are one of the newer biological species to the American Southwest, new shapes of vibrating matter in landscapes where life has been cycling in all sorts of figures and forms for millennia. Even as we often fail to recognize their role in our worlds and ecologies, rattlesnake and human lives have intersected for millennia.

As beings who’ve lived here millions of years longer than we have, the rattlesnakes have a stake in these deserts that we may never understand but would likely do well to respect. However, contemporary Western worldviews perceive landscapes as static spaces full of resources for extraction and profit. Through this way of seeing, rattlesnakes are either functionally useful, invisible, or disposable.  To consider their sentience and innate value seemed ludicrous until recently, as we are only now coming to terms with the fact that this approach to living is destroying us all.

In 2020, I made a series of maps of a tiny canyon in the devastatingly beautiful state of Utah. I aimed to visualize how rattlesnake lives co-mingle with those of humans. Inspired by the patient wisdom that the snakes seem to have in their engagement with us, I aimed to explore their perspective on our relationship.

Even after years of living out of backpacks and under tarps on the land, I had to unearth the rattlesnake’s daily existence with digital data and imaginative curiosity. I used data from iNaturalist, friends’ photographs, and historic pictographs. Though I traveled again and again to Buckhorn Wash in the San Rafael Swell, I never observed their presence among the rocks and shrubs of that place directly.

Nonetheless, these maps of the Swell area surrounding Buckhorn Wash bring some of what is below ground to the surface to explore the relationship between humans and the Crotalus concolor, the rock-loving rattlesnake species of this region.

The Social Lives of Rattlesnakes

Scientists consider the den to be the heart of the rattlesnakes’ homelands, faithfully utilized over thousands of generations, and almost always south-facing.

The first maps I made detail the conditions of rattlesnake lives. I created these using sightings reported on iNaturalist. Because there is no data on C. concolor in Utah, I estimated the snakes’ home range to be about three square kilometers based on what scientists know about their species kin in Wyoming. I then made these ranges visible in cartographic glory via a three-kilometer, pink halo for each rattlesnake observation.

One particular rattlesnake, named “Fifty-Five” on iNaturalist, guides us through the maps. Fifty-five’s pink sphere (where many other rattlesnakes also likely live) includes sunning ledges, places to hunt and dine, areas for mating and otherwise socially connecting, places to shed skin, and rookeries for giving live birth and raising the young.

Between these frequented spots, rattlesnakes leave chemical traces for each other, developing well-worn roads over time, imperceptible to human senses. Mothers leave trails for the young to dens. Friends leave warnings of predators and recommendations for the best food and hunting joints. The snakes can also identify their own chemical signatures, showcasing self-awareness.

Each pink halo is thus a glimpse of a world of chemical highways and social interactions.

Dangerous Interactions: Oil and Gas

The next set of maps unveil the complex intersections and entwinement of the snakes’ lives with human lives, including humans living in distant cities.

Urban life is powered by infrastructure that plunges deep into rural landscapes. On these maps, I give visual markers to existing oil and gas wells, as well as leases for future energy extraction, and the roads built to access these energy supplies. These markers expose the often-invisible damage the fossil fuel industry causes to the homes and lives of creatures underground.

When these companies drill deep into the earth and utilize explosives for seismic surveys, they collapse dens, kill beings, and disturb long-standing social communities.

Fifty-five lives with an oil and gas well in a territory vivisected by human roads. Roads, too, are extremely harmful to snakes. In fact, research shows that half the snakes trying to cross a road with just five cars per hour will die.

In addition to creating deadly borders that disrupt habitat connectivity, roads also open new possibilities of engagement with the land. They give humans—and other creatures—easier paths to travel toward each other.

Pathways of Possibility: Roads and Recreation

As development projects expand into new habitats, our chances for encountering rattlesnakes increase. To many humans, this fact elicits fear. The rattlesnake, after all, is known for their buzzing tail, quick bites, and powerful venom. However, field studies show rattlesnakes are more likely to hide their heads under their body coils than to strike.

Information on rattlesnakes’ interactions with humans remains minimal. However, in many localities, they are known more for their shyness than their hostility. Their rattles are commonly associated with aggression, but scientists think they developed as a means for communicating with mammals. What they are saying remains a mystery. Their rattling seems to be more than just a warning; it may be a request for a non-reactive response, a calm communication tactic. 

Data indicates our actions to be more deadly and destructive than those of rattlesnakes. Yet, there is scant legal protection for rattlesnakes from our destructive forces. Google grizzly bears or wolves, both persecuted potential human-killers, alongside the word “protection” and majestic photos of the beasts appear with the latest news of legislation. Google “rattlesnake protections” and a plethora of ways we might defend ourselves from an interaction with the small creeps materializes. My first search result was snake gaiters (purchasable on Amazon for $36.99).

Mutual Mattering and Our Shared Future

We can try to ignore the rattlesnake’s presence, but the mutual mattering of our lives on this continent is intimate enough that their venom literally keeps human hearts beating. (The leading prescription drugs for heart attacks in the United States use pit viper venom as a key ingredient.)

In the deserts of the American Southwest, some human cultures spanning millennia of generational continuance in rattlesnake country, including the Yaqui, the Hémish, and the Hopi, hold strong associations between rattling pit vipers and the water necessary for all life to thrive. The Hopi revere the rattlesnake “as a critical participant in the chain of events that bring late summer rains [and] neither harm these snakes nor, apparently, fear them.” These cultures have thrived alongside the rattlesnake for centuries.

As a being of the arid West, I’m left wondering if there is a possibility rattlesnakes could be an integral stitch in keeping the health of our homes and bodies intact. As a field biologist, I know there is much we do not know about the work rattlesnakes do in maintaining the integrity of our shared ecological community.

As part of this landscape layered with deep history, the rattlesnake is often unjustly feared, overlooked, and misunderstood by Western cultures. Yet, the serpents I map throughout the blushing, peach-colored canyons and artemisia seas of the Swell awe us with abilities when we pay attention.

Throughout time, humans have associated snakes with nobility, deviltry, dignity, and deity. But while they seem godlike in their earthly persistence, they are also achingly mortal. They are co-creators of our shared human landscape, but the social agreements between us and them feel fragile and fraught.

The maps of rattlesnakes throughout the Swell give a glimpse into the underworld where rattlesnakes persist in spite of the heavy, industrial human hand. They also lend potentiality to new types of encounters. The desert thrives with possibilities.

These maps acknowledge relationship and give due consideration to rattlesnake daily life and community alongside our own dwellings. The hope is to resist ecological amnesia and to move toward seeing each other, recognizing our connections, and finding ways for mutual thriving.

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Featured image: A Crotalus concolor in Buckhorn Wash. Photo by Matt Nordgren, 2019.

Born and bred in the American West, Amber Aumiller has lived the majority of her adulthood outdoors. She loves sleeping on the ground in the belly of a starry sky, being drenched in study of the living earth, and is often covered in dog hair. She holds a B.A. in Global Studies from the University of Minnesota and an M.S. in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah. She wonders continuously what it means to be a human and currently works as a field biologist. Instagram. Contact.