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As my 1000th observation submitted to iNaturalist, here is something a little different and unusual from my archives.

My colleagues and I took this photograph of an actual original and unique X-Ray (physical "hard copy") film made in the Emergency Room of the University hospital in which I worked night shifts back in 2002. It was the regional center for medical treatment of snake bites in north central Florida.

This snake had bitten someone late at night, roughly in the vicinity of Cross Creek, southeast of Gainesville, as I remember, and the snake was killed and brought to the E.R. as proof of the species of poisonous snake that had inflicted the bite, for antivenom administration purposes. There were a couple different types of antivenom then, and they usually took a little time to reconstitute or prepare. All pit vipers in Florida inject similar venom when they bite, but it is different from that of the Coral Snake for instance, which is North America's only native Cobra. Having the actual body of the snake delivered to the E.R. is not absolutely necessary of course, but it does insure correct identification as to species, for whatever that may be worth, at the time, and in later analysis.

While identifying a snake from an X-Ray photograph may be a little unusual, it is not so difficult in this case as some might imagine. After all, here is a very large Pit Viper, totally without tail rattles, in Alachua County Florida.

Just how big was it? Coiled up as you see, it almost doesn't fit on a piece of film that was 11 by 14 inches in size. The snake's head, distorted a bit by the trauma of its demise, alone is nearly 3 inches long, measured directly on the film itself. The snake's coiled body, head to tail, can be measured on the original film by laying a piece of string on the image, tracing the course of the backbone. At 58 inches, or 4 feet 10 inches (147 centimeters) then, this a pretty large snake as Water Moccasins go.

What's more, one of the reasons we X-rayed it at all was that it had clearly recently eaten something. It had a large bulge in it's stomach, down about a third of it's body length, just past its air-filled lungs that are visible on the film as well defined darker shapes. We found the bulge was a big fish with a large blunt bony head, very visible swim bladder, which we took to be a catfish, though we lacked an Ichthyologist amongst the E.R. staff of course. I can follow the fish's spine for quite a ways in the image, but lose it somewhere along the snake's lung in the extreme right of the picture. We did not, in any case dissect the snake in the E.R. Nor did we weigh it, unfortunately. For all I know, the patient, who survived with the help of our treatment, took the dead snake and its last meal home with him when he was discharged.

The Technician that made the actual exposure for us on film, at my request, wrote the details of the exposure for future reference on the film itself, which, though the film suffered damage when it was stolen from my vehicle inside a locked briefcase and dumped out in a back alley and further mistreated both by the thieves and the weather, I can still read most of what he wrote with a "magic marker":
"40(or 46) MA
1 MAS
56 KV"
Are there any X-Ray Tech's out there who can confirm that that is in fact a good exposure for a big dead snake?

Experts - What is going on here? This male American Kestrel sure did seem to have the hots for this female Merlin. He kept trying to get close to her and even brought her a few treats (insects?) from the grass beneath the fence. She accepted the treats but didn't seem thrilled with the attention. However, when he flew off, she followed him...