Early Lundi Gras Present from the Yard Cats

Early this morning, I went to check on the yard cats - Monkey is one we have more or less tamed, though he is definitely an outdoor-only cat. He has a new friend who is a big orange and white cat, but he is still skittish.

Anyway, one of them made us a little Lundi Gras sacrifice:




This was probably a “common earth snake”, like we’ve seen in our backyard before:




It might have even been this same one, since that video was from seven months ago and the one the cats killed was about ten inches long. I never really thought there were snakes around in a densely urban environment like our part of New Orleans; a reptile guy at the zoo told me once that there are some in Audubon park, but here I would have thought the cats and traffic and development would have pretty much driven the snake population down to nothing. But nature prevails and we have seen a few over the years.

I couldn’t get Monkey to pose with it like I wanted him to, though he was batting at it for a bit after I got my camera, so the LOL didn’t really turn out like I had hoped: