This desert is snakier than I remember it.
Last year, I moved my family from Las Vegas to Tucson, back to the Sonoran Desert of my youth after 25 years in southern Nevada.
Almost right away, there were snakes — far more of them than I ever saw during my travels through the Mojave or my childhood here.
I felt like I had stumbled into some hackneyed movie about my hometown, written by someone from the Midwest who only knew the clichés.
I’d spent my entire life defending the desert’s honor, faithfully correcting outsiders’ wrongheaded assumptions about this place I come from: No, I never rode to school on horseback. Yes, it gets hot, but not so much that you’ll die. Sure, there are snakes, though you hardly ever see them.
Now, suddenly, I was seeing them. And other critters, too.
Henry Brean
Since we moved down here, it looks like I’ve handed over my social media accounts to the slightly desperate promotions manager for a plucky desert zoo.
The two most popular online videos I’ve ever posted have come in the past six months. One features 37 oddly calming seconds of a Cooper’s hawk spinning lazily on top of the floating chlorine dispenser in my swimming pool.
The other is worthy of narration by David Attenborough or Marlin Perkins. It shows a turkey vulture tearing long, gory strips from a rattlesnake carcass just beyond our fence, then getting chased off by a coyote that stops just long enough to urinate on the dead snake before trotting away.
My Facebook friends like to tease me about all the wildlife posts. A few of them seem genuinely concerned for the safety of my children. But we wanted it this way. My wife and I searched for a house with some desert around it precisely so we could commune with nature.
We loved our old house in Las Vegas, but in 13 years there we only ever saw a handful of bedraggled geckos and city lizards and what little our bird feeders would attract.
Day in the life of a small cross-section of creatures that come and go behind Daily Star reporter Henry Brean's house in Tucson. Video by Henry Brean / Arizona Daily Star, produced by Rick Wiley (2020)
I once spotted a tarantula-hunting wasp scuttling along a sidewalk near our house not far from UNLV, and I was so excited that I considered skipping work so I could follow it in search of big, hairy spiders.
Now we have our own rocky hill speckled with ironwood and palo verde trees and a few prepubescent saguaros.
We climb to the top of it almost daily for sunset panoramas of Tucson over the Cañada del Oro.
Since spring, this has become our place to let the day go — the headlines and the home confinement and everything else about this unparalleled mess we’re all in. Sometimes we carry drinks. Sometimes we watch the sunset through wildfire smoke.
This king snake stayed outside, but one made it to a hallway near the kids’ bedrooms.
Most evenings, we are greeted at the top of the hill by a swirling trio of nighthawks or a single orange-winged tarantula wasp, which buzzes by with such purpose and direction that we’ve taken to imagining it commuting home from work with a tiny briefcase in its mandibles.
We’ve gotten to know our local coyotes pretty well, too. The same group — a family, we think — wanders by so frequently that we recognize each individual at a glance. Our neighborhood rings with their yips and howls several times a night. They will all have names before long.
Other animals we’ve seen so far (and occasionally hosted in our small, fenced backyard) include: a bobcat, several Cooper’s hawks, a family of screech owls, dozens of snorting, stinky javelinas, and countless lizards, quails, rabbits, songbirds, packrats and round-tailed ground squirrels.
Why wouldn’t there be snakes?
We’ve found several black-and-yellow-banded kingsnakes — handsome and harmless — in our garden and our garage and (just the one time!) in the hallway outside the kids’ bedrooms.
We’ve also seen some rattlesnakes — more of them in the past year, in fact, than I remember encountering the whole time I was growing up here. Most have been polite enough to stick to their side of the fence. At least two so far have slithered in for a closer look.
Just before bed a couple of months ago, I discovered a large Western diamondback relaxing on our fake lawn, about 15 feet from the open dog door.
A few weeks later, I interrupted a tiny diamondback washing down a recent meal with a sip from our swimming pool as my oblivious 13-year-old daughter dived and splashed nearby. Even this was OK with me.
Coyotes are common outside Brean’s yard; they will have names before long.
I expected more wildlife encounters here. I hoped for them. Still, I was not prepared for how many more there would be.
It’s been a soothing, sometimes exhilarating distraction, especially now that we’re all trapped at home with nothing left to binge except the show outside our windows.
My wife keeps a pair of binoculars on her home-office desk and several birding apps on her phone.
My kids are more inclined to coo than scream at the sight of a tarantula. They want to keep it as a pet, not kill it with fire, and I’m as proud of this as any of the parenting I’ve done so far.
But a shocking amount of our backyard wildlife content is rated M for mature. Even here in the suburbs, nature can be a horror show.
We saw a baby rabbit, small enough to cup in your hand, foraging adorably beneath our bird feeder, only to turn up stone dead a minute later, then disappear without a trace 10 minutes after that.
We learned the hard way that Gila woodpeckers don’t just use their beaks on trees, after we witnessed one massacre of a clutch of baby songbirds we had been following since they hatched.
We watched a pair of ravens harass a mother hawk to exhaustion so they could raid her nest, flying off with a still-living hatchling as it struggled and cried out in distress.
That’s the thing about embracing the natural world around you: You rarely get to choose who or what you see.
Luckily, all of it is worth a look.
As we slog to the end of this giant asterisk of a year, with nothing to sustain us but bad habits and terrible news, I think more nature is exactly what we need.
It reminds us of the variety, fragility and inevitability of life. It connects us with something larger, older and more enduring than ourselves.
And if we are willing to let it in — spiritually at least, if not literally into our homes — it can serve to warn us against breaking things we can never hope to fix.
Even the awful stuff teaches us something of value: that everything needs to eat, that everything has a part to play, that there are plenty of things out there we simply cannot control.
A surprising number of those things turn out to be snakes.
A Western Screech-Owl at Arizona Daily Star writer Henry Brean's house in Tucson.
A javelina at Arizona Daily Star writer Henry Brean's house in Tucson.
A rattlesnake at Arizona Daily Star writer Henry Brean's house in Tucson.
