Drinking is a behavior rarely seen in wild snakes. In fact, some would say that snakes don’t need to drink. While it is rare to see this behavior, snakes do drink and likely need water in addition to what they acquire from their food. How important drinking is to snakes became very clear to me one day in March 2006. Despite cold, rainy, windy, and even snowy weather, we saw more than a dozen Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnakes drinking rain and snow outside their dens!
Last summer was pretty dry at our field site; the monsoon did not amount to much. The following videos were taken by our timelapse cameras while the snakes were still pregnant: