The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 28, Number 3; March, 2001

Funniest Herp Story

by Marty Rosenberg

Reprinted from Notes from NOAH, the newsletter of the Northern Ohio Association of Herpetologists, Vol.28, No.4, January 2001.

Sometime in the mid-sevendes, soon after I became interested in herpetology, I acquired a beautiful rosy rat snake during a field trip to the Florida Keys. At that time, rosy rats (Elaphe guttata rosacea) were considered to be a subspecies of the corn snake (red rats, Elaphe guttata guttata), and this specimen was really quite distinctive in its subdued oranges and tangerines and pinks. The snake occupied a prominent position in my small collection of herps kept in my office at Case Western Reserve University.

At that time I did not know about the molded plastic cages that are commonly used today for herps, or maybe they weren't even available back then. And so I kept this snake, as well as the several others I had, in the usual 10-gallon aquarium with a screen top held down by duct tape. With the usual consequences, of course.

A week went by, two weeks, a month. No rosy rat snake. Why didn't I use more tape or a stack of books on the screen top! Oh well, live and learn. I kicked myself almost daily for losing that beautiful snake. There were numerous pipes and ducts passing through the walls of my office, and I assumed the snake had found one of these openings and had made good his escape.

About two months after the rosy decided to take a stroll, I was sitting at my desk talking on the telephone regarding some fairly important matters, as I recall. I had my feet up on the desk, leaning back in my chair, and was deep in conversation with somebody from the Budget Office at the university. My eyes were focused on the ceiling in deep concentration about the matters under discussion.

All of a sudden, the phone went dead. What in the world happened? Was my end of the conversation so drab that the caller from the Budget Office had hung up on me? Swinging my feet off the desk, I turned my chair off to the side of the desk where the telephone sat in order to redial the number.

As I did this, however, the cause for the sudden telephone silence quickly became apparent. My long lost rosy had emerged from wherever it was hiding in my office and had slithered across the phone, depressing the switch hook, thereby cutting me off. Mystery solved.

I quickly checked the snake over and put him back in his cage. As I was getting him settled in, the phone rang. "How come you hung up on me??!!!" my caller said. "You're not going to believe this," I said, "but...."