220526 Sentinel, Mating

Mating is something all humans and animals do.

I used to watch a lot of nature shows on PBS. That was before we had streaming service and only had 4 TV channels. One that fascinated me was the mating ritual of birds. The males made nests for the females and would puff out their feathers and do their best dance to attract her attention and result in mating. Sometimes no matter how hard the male tried, the female would just walk away. That was TV and I had never witnessed it in real life, until yesterday morning. Just outside my glass door on the patio, a large male black bird was puffing and extending his wings for a female. I was impressed with his performance, but sadly the female was not interested and she hopped away, leaving the male frustrated and he soon flew away.

That performance brought back a memory. I was sitting on the front porch of our farm house when I noticed two large black snakes about 15 feet away and they were courting. It was fascinating. They would continually rub against each other, head to tail and then turn and try again. I must have watched them for nearly an hour. I had never seen anything like it. I wondered this morning about how snakes do the deed? Lucky for me, Google had the answer
A female's cloaca is shallow. The first snake to successfully wrap his tail around the female and meet at the right point for intercourse to occur gets to mate. Male snakes have a pair of sex organs called hemipenis and these extend and release the sperm into the female snake.
We are never too old to learn something new.