Yes, you heard right.  George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, is blogging from the great beyond. Actually, it’s the organization who runs The Orwell Prize that’s doing the blogging, publishing Orwell’s diaries exactly 70 years from the day each entry was written. And in the very first post, George describes catching a snake.

Delilah writes:  "Do you know much about snakes? We saw a skinny 2′ green one." That snake looks like what we used to call a ‘vine snake’ and they’re harmless.  It looks to be, officially, a "Rough Green Snake" (Opheodrys aestivus).  That’s my guess based upon the area where you found it, otherwise I’d eyeball […]

I’ve heard that snakes will swallow strange things, like, oh, alligators, and I personally saw a little garter snake trying to eat a sparrow way too large for it to ever successfully swallow. Here, however, is a National Geographic article about a Australian Carpet Python who has a taste for golf balls:  Python Undergoes Golf […]

Out lizard hunting one morning I saw a pair of very fast, thin snakes which crossed the dirt road in front of me, side by side, their heads held high off the ground. The two looked like a team, and this sent a thrill through me. I’d never seen snakes do this before. Their movements […]

Across the street from my childhood home was open desert, and when I was about 8 years old and was feeling the freedom of my first bicycle, my friends and I would go out and ride for miles down dirt roads that crisscrossed through the cactus and brush. We explored ruins of adobe buildings where […]