Nature Almanac: Rattlesnakes

Rattlesnakes have benefited from this year’s rains, which have led to plenty of prairie dogs and other rodents for the snakes to eat. Now, those rattlesnakes are heading from their hunting grounds around places like the Boulder Reservoir and Eagle Trail, to their winter dens. KGNU’s Shelley Schlender joins Naturalists Ruth Carol Cushman and Steve Jones on this week’s Nature Almanac, to go out carefully looking into abandoned prairie dog burrows along the Boulder Reservoir, looking for rattlesnakes.

“We tried to figure out what are the odds of actually being killed by a rattlesnake bite in Colorado and we found it’s about the same as the odds of being killed by a vending machine in Colorado,” says Jones.

Listen in to their conversation for more on the world of rattlesnakes: