Speaking of Walls and Rock Piles...

and "Serpent Stacking"

http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2011/12/speaking-of-walls-and-rock-piles.html

      I’ve been looking at this Peter Waksman photo above for 5 and a half years now.

     Not all the time for 5 and a half years of course, but every once in a while. The image comes up on my screen saver, but I also open the photo up every now and then, just to view it as a large image. I was just looking at some similar stacking of stones in “walls” that I encounter in western CT, stuff that isn’t bricks and blocks or one over two and all that typical stuff, illustrated below:

      When all the typical stuff says that stone walls that lack that orderly and proper stacking are examples of bad run etc. and merely reflect the random and haphazard stacking of stones cleared from a farmer’s field, a linear landfill connected to post-contact agrarian practices. But is it??

     That white quartz rhomboidal stone would certainly catch anyone’s eye, but take a closer look at the stones that finally just caught my eye, just to the right of that white stone:

     Then look here at this (crop of a section of a) stolen image from a Google Search:

http://www.californiaherps.com/snakes/images/cohellerisdm809sfx.jpg

     So let’s mash the photos up and see if there might be some “Serpent Stacking” going on, a snake head and patterns of scales that are on the "realistic species specific" side of artistic stone stacking:

     In my opinion, there were some careful choices made in stone selection and stone stacking, something more artistic than simply stacking “refuse stones” from a field, making a "garbage heap" at the edge of a farm field or pasture.

     And looking back at Peter’s post, perhaps something similar in snake biology is going on here at the same site, at least to my eye (and in relationship to the scales around a snake's eye):