I could lament the cold weather and limited herping options, or I could do something useful: scout.

This is the time of year to do it, fellow herpers. The leaves are down, not in the way of any views of rocky outcroppings or vernal pools. So I don't want to hear anyone kvetching about not finding rattlers (Crotalus horridus) or wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta). You should get out and find we're they'll be.

In that spirit I checked out a new mountainside last weekend (November 22nd). "New" for me; I suppose it's been there a few million years and plenty of other people must walk the same trails. But it's a new project for me, at least, walking the trails below, hacking around on the ridge, noting the locations of the rocks...

...seeps (where I turned up two-lined salamanders - Eurycea bislineata - and dusky salamanders - Desmognathus fuscus).

I managed to recruit three buddies to come with - Anthony and Lillian sitting, and Joshua standing in the lime green.

The site looks good; maybe too good, with more than I can manage to actually search once spring rolls around, but maybe it will be a good multi-year project. I just need a neat code name for the spot (like Forbidden Ridge). Tumble Down? Crocodile Rock? Hidden Drive?

DVHS meeting December 11th at 7:30pm in Maple Shade, NJ.

Our next public meeting will be over on the OTHER side of the Delaware River. Marple didn't work out this time, so we're meeting in Maple Shade, NJ. Our speaker will be Ed Kowalski, the Lead Keeper at the Philadelphia Zoo's Herpetology Department. He will be talking about caecillians. "Caecillians?" you ask. "What the hell are caecillians?" Exactly. Of all the orders of reptiles and amphibians, there is none I (or most of us for that matter) know less about than the caecillians. Basically they're long, eel or snake-shaped amphibians, some of them aquatic, some of them burrowing underground. I'm excited about it, and I hope to see everyone there.

Check out http://dvherps.wordpress.com for the full details.

I suppose I could drive up to the mountains again soon, and I probably will, but my inclinations have swung me around to local herping this fall, the short trips where it takes me a half hour to get there and I don't have to carve out big chunks of my schedule to make it work.

I've heard about Carpenter's Woods for years now - a small branch of park along a stream in Mt. Airy that sort of connects down to the bigger trunk of the Wissahickon. It's a local hot spot for birders, and Scott goes there often with Miles to hike around and flip rocks for salamanders.

The creek emerges from a storm sewer and starts off rocky and, to my eyes, not very promising, the rocks looking like they get tumbled about and rearranged each time there's a big storm. Much of the upper section of the stream was layered with newly fallen leaves. In this photo is looks like a series of puddles.



Further down I found more of a flood plain, a flat muddy area with its own scrubby vegetation rather than the hillside trees growing almost right down to the water, and the creek carving out a channel through softer sediment.

So, here's the salamander I found. Yup, it's a redback (Plethodon cinereus). Followers of this blog might wonder, "just one?" That's what I wondered; I've been finding dozens of them lately in the Mt. Moriah cemetery.

I guess with just one I could focus on its interesting details. Fall into winter is breeding season for red backs, and this male showed two bumps coming down from its upper lip, enlarged naso-labial glands. Salamander foreplay involves the male rubbing his lip and chin (where there's another of these glands) all over the female to turn her on, and presumably some secretions from these glands help get her in the mood.

I haven't read a childrens picture book about toads in a long time, but if you asked me to draw one of the illustrations I'd put the toad next to a log, at the top of a burrow. Thus I got a nice little giggle out of finding this crotchety-looking (it was cloudy and chilly - 51 degrees) American toad (Bufo americanus) on the other side of a rotting log, just at the head of its burrow.

It occurs to me that I had forgotten the pleasures of hunting stream bed and stream side salamanders. This week I remembered. I stepped frankly right into the shallow water with my sneakers and welcomed the cool water flooding my socks. I looked at all those rocks at the edge of the water and didn't need to think much. I just hooked my hand over the first that looked too big for a raccoon to flip (my standard for rocks that might hide decent sized salamanders), felt the rough stone, the weight, and leaned back, the gravel and sand beneath giving up their grip on the rock. I didn't find anything under the first one, but that's not much of a problem. Another pleasure of flipping rocks in streams is the meditative quality of the repetition, rock after rock, working up or down the stream by inches.

The fall is a fine time to focus on salamanders. I worry that I insult the true salamander fans, the implication of that sentence being that I look for salamanders when I can't find snakes or turtles, and that's probably true. Still, the point of this post is that I have more fun than I thought I did, and I've been missing out each time I've walked past or through a rocky creek without climbing down into it.

If missing all that fun isn't bad enough, I didn't have to drive very far. I had met Ryan (who goes by EyesOfTheworld on Field Herp Forum) at his place not too far into Delaware County, and he was kind enough to show me some of his salamander spots in the near suburbs. I could also go flip salamanders in the Wissahickon, Pennypack Park, or any of a number of nearby places.

I saw the usual stream suspects - dusky salamanders (Desmognathus fuscus - no photo) and two-lined salamanders (Eurycea bislineata):

I also flipped a green frog (Rana melanota) that seemed awfully sluggish until we tried to take its picture: The big target of the afternoon lived a little bit up from the stream sides. Red salamanders (Pseudotriton ruber) tend to live up in seeps, which are those wet, muddy stretches where water seeps (no better word for it) out of the hillside and works its way down to the creek.


Redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) were everywhere the other salamanders weren't - in other words under almost every rock, log, and piece of trash up from the water. Here are a handful from Mt. Moriah Cemetery, where I stopped on my way to see Ryan:


Here is an itty-bitty redback from one of our stops in Delaware County:


I'll wind up, incongruously, with a snake. Ryan is lucky enough to have brown snakes living and apparently hibernating in his back yard. Here's one of them:

On the one hand I like to contest other herpers' end-of-the-season laments by declaring all the things you can still find into the end of October, and even November. On the other I feel that sense of panic, that sense of it all slipping away into winter and nothing you can do to hold it back, however badly you want to.

Even now, at the very beginning of November, I am still watching the weather forecasts for one more sunny day to get out and find snakes and maybe streamside salamanders, but I suspect the season for timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus) is over. Scott and I planned a big end-of-the-year trip to Forbidden Ridge a week and a half ago, figuring that it's about time for the snow and cold to drive everything out of sight, and even then we found surprisingly little.

The day was about right - temperatures in the low 60s (maybe not quite enough sun), but we wondered how the snowy weather and freezes the week before might have affected our scaly friends; would they still be basking in whatever sun they could find, or would they all have been driven too far underground to pop back to the surface to bask?

We can't say it wasn't a beautiful day. I know I say and write this a lot, but even a poor day of herping in the mountains is a good day hiking.
We were keeping our eyes peeled for big, meaty, badass adult rattlesnakes basking around a talus slope (rock slide on hillside) that I think is their winter den site, their 'hibernaculum.' When we showed up to the supposed hibernaculum, the heavy, damp clouds were keeping everything out of sight, but as the sun began to play hide-and-seek with us we heard dozens of little rustling noises around us from between the rocks. Any one of those rustlings could have been the tiniest breeze stirring a dead fallen leaf against its neighbor, and we reminded ourselves of that even as our instincts told us we were hearing snakes; if we were right about the snakes, we wanted to give them a moment to settle down before we moved towards them to avoid spooking them right back down in between the rocks.

Well, they weren't leaves; they were baby rattlers! Scott and I spotted a handful (four or five?) curled up on pads of leaves, enjoying the sun beams penetrating between the rocks. Baby rattlers spook easily, so we didn't get many photos, but I was still and patient enough to watch a couple of them crawl around.

This was a true thrill - I guess they figured I was yet another dead tree trunk standing up from the rocks, because they bumbled along with no apparent hurry or fear. I write 'bumble' because they moved with very little grace over the rocks, often having to retrace their path when they came up to a rock they couldn't scale, and sliding off clumsily when they lost the grip on smoother boulders.

Here's one picture I left relatively uncropped to show how well they blend in. Look along the bottom-left of the chunk of conglomerate for that mini rattler working along the rock's edge.


Here's another one, easier to spot sitting on another boulder. [this photo is not sitting well with Blogger.com - click on it for a better view]


We didn't see any of the bigger adults, leaving me unsure of my earlier certainty that I had found the hibernaculum. Maybe the adults were just deeper underground; maybe they were one talus slope over on the hillside. I guess we'll have to go back and check in the spring :-)

Check out a great new informational sheet on our humble and beloved brown snake (Storeria dekayi). Of course I'm biased about the sheet since I wrote it and took the photos, but I deserve absolutely none of the credit for the idea or how beautiful the sheet looks. Jason Poston, the force behind the PA Herp website, came up with the concept and then took my words and some of my hastily snapped photos and turned them into a professional grade (Jason is a design professional, though PA Herp is a labor of love) piece of literature.

No, I'm not only ogling rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) this fall, as wonderful as they are. I am still herping Philadelphia, although primarily my stomping grounds in the Mt. Moriah Cemetery.


It's hard to miss that the redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) are out again. I started seeing them a few weeks ago, and now they're under everything I lift up. They appear as if by magic as the temperatures drop, but there's a very ordinary explanation; these salamanders are very vulnerable to high temperatures and to dry conditions, so they stay deeper underground (at least during the day) for the heat of the summer. Now that daytime temps are back in their comfort zone, they're back near the surface.


There are still some snakes about too. Here's a big female brown snake (Storeria dekayi) I've found a couple times. I went for a walk recently with a friend in the cemetery. We saw the expected salamanders, but we also saw this migrant passing through, I assume on its way to central Mexico.