Source Materials: The Wildest Life in the Wilderness

Gather 'round, boys and girls, and I'll tell you a True Anecdote^TM from the life of the Disneyland Dilettante.

I think most children discover the joy of roller coasters as soon as they're tall enough to get on one, pretty much. Call it age four. But I? I was a bit of a coward during my early childhood. I wasn't afraid of being thrown from a roller coaster car—I was bright enough to know that wasn't a real risk—but of being scared, of finding the bumpy motion too much for my peace of mind. I had nothing to fear but fear itself.

When I was about eight years old, I finally mustered up the courage to try out Disneyland's coasters. And loved them, of course. But there was a snag: I had a little sister who looked up to me. I had convinced her that roller coasters were too scary, and she didn't trust the sudden turnaround. “It's okay,” I told her. “They're actually not scary,” I opined. Nope. No sell.

“At least try this one,” I said finally. “You'll like it...it has animals on it.”

That did the trick. Roller coasters became, finally, fun for our whole family, because one coaster had the right carrot for the youngest member thereof. The ride in question? Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

The wildlife presence on this ride is probably part of the draw for a lot of people. One of the main reasons people visit real wilderness areas is the hope of encountering animals they don't get to see every day. Big Thunder is far from the only ride at Disneyland to heavily feature wild animals, but it's one of the only ones to offer a mostly realistic, straightforward take on them. These animals are not cartoon characters, they're not space aliens, and they're not being pointed out to us by a sarcastic college student. They're just...present, adding interest to an already exciting landscape.

But you know, it is a fast, bumpy ride, and some of the critters are more noticeable than others. It's entirely possible that you've missed some of them, reducing the quality of your experience.

But that's why I introduced Source Materials to this blog—to catalog and perhaps provide an explanatory look at these details from the outside world that add detail to the world inside Disneyland.

So let's talk animals!

Vultures

These guys are visible long before you get on the ride—from some angles you can spot them easily before you even enter the queue. The common turkey vulture or turkey buzzard (Cathartes aura) is surely the iconic animal of the Southwestern desert, contributing heavily to the shallow notion that not much else can survive there. Like all scavengers, however, they are vital to the local ecosystem, eating carrion that would otherwise harbor harmful disease—hence the genus name Cathartes, which is Latin for “purifier.”

Here's an odd little observation: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is one of no less than four attractions in Disneyland which feature vultures. The other three are the Jungle Cruise, Splash Mountain, and Snow White's Scary Adventures. The attraction most associated with death, however—the Haunted Mansion—is vulture-free, having opted for a more Gothic carrion bird instead.

Bats

Oh, the realism.

Nah, I shouldn’t snark so hard. Big Thunder’s bats are about as realistic as can be expected given that they are low-tech imitations of flying animals. They appear just before the first lift, before your eyes have had time to adjust to the darkness, so they’re convincing enough.

But you know something? It doesn't mean very much to say there are “bats” in Big Thunder Mountain—it's about as particular as saying “rodents” or “primates.” No, scratch that, it's exactly as particular, because all three of these terms describe taxonomic categories on the level of Order within the Class Mammalia. There are roughly 1,200 species of bats in the world, so which one are we dealing with here?

Answer: We can't say for sure. The Big Thunder beasties were designed to be a mild jump-scare in the dark, not a field guide illustration. The most common bat in the American Southwest is the Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis), which is pretty close to what most people probably think of as a “standard” bat:

It's a decent match for the Big Thunder bats in both size and coloration, and Mexican free-tailed bats are known to roost in caves in large numbers. Is it a lock? Obviously not. But you likely can't prove otherwise.

Opossums

Well, so much for realism...

The Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), North America's only marsupial and a familiar sight to suburban residents who own garbage cans, does in fact have a prehensile tail and will occasionally hang by it from a tree branch, especially as a joey.*

But they don't swing around the branches like Olympic gymnasts.

I'm guessing this is a leftover gag from the Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland.

Oh, also? It's actually very rare to see opossums in the area represented by Big Thunder Mountain. They are common east of the Rockies and on the West Coast (where they were introduced in the first half of the Twentieth Century), but not in the big dry space between.

Coyotes

If the turkey vulture is the most iconic animal of the American desert, then these guys surely take second place. The coyote (Canis latrans) lives basically everywhere in North America, but in lusher climes tend to be upstaged by bears, wolves, and pumas. In the desert, though? Coyotes own that joint.

The Big Thunder coyotes number two, perched precariously on ledges of a rock arch and howling as we pass beneath them. This checks out—coyotes often hunt in pairs (mated, siblings, or just homies), are smart and agile enough to reach such tight spaces without fear, and their yelping howl is probably their signature characteristic.

Tortoises

There are two species of desert tortoise, their ranges separated by the Colorado River. As the Big Thunder Mountain landscape mimics the sandstones of northern Arizona and southern Utah, these calm critters foraging to the left of the second lift are most likely to be Agassiz's desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii). They are hardy animals, capable of surviving over a year without drinking water and living to be as much as 80 years old...but they are threatened by habitat loss and predation by introduced species. If you happen to be in the real desert and encounter tortoises, please leave them be. It's actually illegal to mess with them.

Rattlesnakes

Further up the lift, we see these two hostile (and suspiciously identical) serpents. There are 36 known species of rattlesnakes (genera Crotalus and Sistrurus), ranging throughout the temperate and warm regions of the Americas, with the great majority of them found in the southwestern United States and Mexico.

So which of the 36 are these? Well...I can't seem to find a photo with markings that match these closely enough for a slam-dunk. Could Big Thunder Mountain be the habitat of a 37^th species of rattler previously unknown to science? How has it gone undescribed all these years when two healthy specimens sit in plain sight of thousands of people, day after day?

That's it, I'm calling it! The Big Thunder rattlesnake, Crotalus megabrontus. You're welcome, science!

Goat

So among all the wild animals, we apparently have one domestic one, or do we? The domestic goat (Capra aegagrus hircus) is hardy, wily enough to escape from many forms of containment, and capable of eating vegetation that would sicken many other kinds of livestock, and thus readily goes feral. Certainly no properly cared for goat would have an opportunity to snack on dynamite, right?

Of course, a feral animal is not the same as a wild one. Even if Bang-Bang Billy here is several generations removed from his cultivated ancestors, he's still not a wild goat as such. It's largely academic, since on a diet like this he's not likely to be around much longer.

Skunks

Hey, where's the photo?

I have a confession to make: I couldn't find a clear enough image of Big Thunder Mountain's skunks to actually use for the blog, so you'll have to take my word for the information in this section.

Yes, there are skunks on this ride. They can be easy to miss, since they're part of a relatively cluttered scene right across the from the much more attention-grabbing goat. They're not as easy to miss as they were only a few years ago, having been refurbished when the ride's climax was changed from an earthquake to an explosives accident. If you glance at the TNT barrels next to the little shack, you'll see them doing the infamous warning “handstand” out of alarm at our approach.

Here we hit a major issue, however. The size and markings of the Big Thunder skunks are typical of the striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis), the most widespread of the North American skunks. However, there is a small gap in the range of this species...which just so happens to line up with the region where the mountain is purportedly located:

Even more damning is the handstand behavior, which is exhibited not by the striped skunk but by its rather smaller cousin, the spotted skunk (Spilogale gracilis). Not only that, but these stinkers are doing it wrong, facing away from us and exposing their bellies, when the actual methodology is to face toward the threat, the better to a) show off the highly recognizable “I'm a skunk, yo,” markings and b) aim.

Fortunately, this will all be pretty easy to fix if they ever decide it's worth fixing. (Spoiler: They won't.)

And now for the last, but possibly best, animal on the list!

Tyrannosaurus rex

Okay, so it's a major stretch to call this wild life, but we can scarcely discuss Big Thunder Mountain Railroad without mentioning its most dramatic setpiece. The mighty T. rex, still the archetype of predatory dinosaurian fury even though larger carnosaurs have been discovered, lived throughout what is now the western United States, including the Southwest. As the Disneyland Railroad informs us, the landscape looked very different back then.

These dino bones are in remarkably good condition for apparently having been exposed via natural rock weathering rather than careful paleontological excavation; moreover, the specimen seems to have been a nesting female!

And the moral of the story is: The mine may be full of gold, but the real treasure is the memories we created togeth—ANIMALS! The real treasure is the animals. Be kind to them.

* We were all told growing up that baby kangaroos are called joeys, but the term is applied to the young of all marsupials.