Series on Myths: Bullsnakes Eat or Keep Rattlesnakes Out

I was raised here in the Panhandle, so I have no qualms what-so-ever with discussing some of the "not so correct" teachings we grew up on.  

Bullsnakes are good to keep around because they eat rattlesnakes or they are good to keep around because they keep rattlesnakes away.  Fiction:  Bullsnakes are great to keep around, but for a vastly different reason than what the local teaching indicates.  Bullsnakes are extremely beneficial in that they are a rodent-eater deluxe!  Aren't snakes the perfect mousing machine?.  If they can get their head through a hole, they can usually enter it to secure a meal.

End the brag session, right there, but that is enough to consider them valuable.

Range-wide analyses of bullsnake diets have yielded the same result time and time again.  Bullsnakes are nearly a specialist on rodents.  In the summer months, they will switch heavily to bird eggs and nestlings should the nest density be worth the energy to search them out.  Snakes in their diet?  Rattlesnakes?  A snake or two showed up in the stomachs of the thousands of bullsnakes examined......but literally a snake or two.

Bullsnakes certainly don't keep rattlesnakes out of anywhere.  I'll explain how this probably got started in a minute.  Ask me to take you out to an area that will have the highest densities of bullsnakes...do you know where I am going to take you?  I am going to take you to habitat that I know as having the highest densities of rattlesnakes (watch your step).  Bullsnakes and rattlesnakes are both predators of warm-blooded prey (mice, birds).  They commonly winter in the same dens, can be found basking a few feet from each other, hunt the same trails, holes, packrat middens, etc.  There is no territoriality what-so-ever, in either bullsnakes or rattlesnakes, although males of either will "combat" each other when competing for the same "ready" female.

So how did this myth get started?  Bullsnakes are more tolerant of cultivated areas.  So in areas with more cultivation, bullsnakes may remain plentiful, while rattlesnakes will often be rare.  Bullsnakes get their name from features of their skulls that aid them in pushing through loose soil (loose soil within gopher holes, cultivated soils, etc.).  The skulls have ridges, that resemble bull horns, only visible under close examination.  Although, I am not saying that bullsnakes regularly plow through cultivated fields, they are none-the-less more able to survive there.

So you have seen a bullsnake eating a rattlesnake?  Wow!  Are you sure it was a bullsnake doing the eating?  Did you know the mating of bullsnakes is violent (?) - the male bites the female during the act, holding her down.  Did you see a bullsnake trying to mate with a female or tussling with a male?  Are you sure the snake doing the "eating" was a bullsnake and not a kingsnake or a coachwhip?  By the way, neither of these will lower a rattlesnake population or keep them away.

If you think you see a bullsnake eating a rattlesnake, please post it on here.  This will be a rare photo, indeed!