July phenology: Precocious bird chicks and melodramatic reptiles

In July 2024’s installment of Monthly Phenology with Pam Perry, we're treated to fun facts about toads, baby birds, snakes posing as different snakes and much more. Enjoy — and learn more about our favorite reptilian posers below!

Topics

• Introduction (0:00-0:17)
• Altricial and precocial chicks (0:17-3:26)
• Hummingbirds vanish from feeders (3:26-5:03)
• Fledgling woodpeckers (5:03-7:52)
• Red-breasted Nuthatches (7:52-9:20)
• Chipmunks (9:20-12:47)
• Toads (12:47-14:47)
• Snakes (14:47-19:06)
• Conclusion (19:06-19:35)

Meet the hognose and its scaly snout

Like John and Pam, I love our local snakes. In Minnesota, 99.99% of snakes are not venomous — you run no chance of seeing a wild venomous snake anywhere other than southeastern Minnesota, and even there, they're pretty rare.

Instead, our neighborhood snakes include benign and beneficial friends such as the ubiquitous garter snakes, redbelly snakes and Dekay’s brown snakes. If you’re very lucky, you might also live near my favorite snake species: the hognose snake. Minnesota is blessed with two species of hog-nosed snakes: the Eastern and Plains hognoses.

Hognoses get their name for their adorably upturned snoots, which they use to dig in sand and unearth prey like toads, salamanders and small rodents. You know when you pick up toads, they sometimes inflate themselves to twice their usual size? Hognose snakes have specialized teeth in the back of their mouth to puncture these amphibious balloons, making them much easier to swallow.

Charlie Mitchell

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KAXE-KBXE

Our shovel-nosed friends employ some adorable and hilarious tactics to avoid getting eaten. If threatened, most hognoses will slither away (flight), attempt to intimidate you (fight) or play dead (freeze).

Since they aren’t particularly fast-moving compared to other snakes, they quickly give up on flight if you try to catch one. Instead, it'll do its best to live up to hognose’s name as the most over-dramatic snake in the Midwest.

First, it’ll (try to) intimidate you. The hognose — which, again, is essentially as dangerous as an overgrown spaghetti noodle — will coil up and flatten out its neck, making a hissing noise and occasionally clacking its specialized toad-puncturing teeth. To the uninitiated, this is a passable cobra impression. For those in the know, it’s as adorable as a basset hound puppy pretending to be a wolf. Given that there are no wild cobras anywhere near Minnesota, there is absolutely no logical reason to be fooled by this charade.

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Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).