Philly Herping

2012-01-31T08:30:00.000-08:00

Nothing encourages brevity in blogging like the extra time demands of an infant, so I'll be brief and get to the photos. In between our fun in the Escambia system and the fun I present right here, Scott and I did some major striking out. Some of this entailed showing up to a river and finding that it was virtually opaque, with trot lines (what's a trot line? Keep reading) dangling from all the snags we'd want to get intimate with, compelling us to give up and try another spot. Some of this entailed showing up to a river and finding that it was virtually opaque and the two of us being so desperate we jumped in anyhow and discovered that indeed we could not see our hands in front of our faces, let alone any of the map turtles we'd seen drop in right here.

So, when we pulled up under this bridge over a tributary of the Pearl River, and we saw this river, with water that was murky enough to have scared me away at the beginning of the trip but a hell of a lot clearer than the last few rivers we'd looked at, we jumped in.

Good thing we did. I'll start with another musk turtle species, this one razor-backed (Sternotherus carinatus). Here are a few that we found. I thought these were just the cutest things on the planet. Dig that sharp keel that gives them their name:

We got excited early on by something that maybe, just maybe from far away could have been a map turtle...

Nope, another river cooter (Pseudemys concinna). It was a cute little tyke, though.

We finally found maybe the coolest turtle on the planet (G. oculifera). I love it when animals look like something dreamed up by a second-grader with a box of crayons.

We saw some turtles drop off a log - nothing unusual there. They included some little guys as well as a larger turtle. Here's one of the little guys, a male Pearl River map turtle (G. pearli).

(Here's another one from a different spot on the river - same as the photo leading off the post. Note the tail - definitely a male.)

I was intrigued by that big one, though. We searched up and down the submerged tree of which that emergent log was just one part, but we found no large turtle. I turned upstream a little, focusing on some slack water along a cutout bank. The bottom of the river kept on getting deeper, and I kept on following it. I knew I was on to something when I found a large submerged log down there. I came up for air, dove back down, and sure enough saw the leaf edge of a shell tucked underneath. I shot to the surface, turtle in one hand and lungs in near-rebellion for lack of air.

Here's the star of the river, a female G. pearli in all her beefy, shell-crushing glory. Keep in mind that she and the male above are both adults of the same species. Now that's sexual dimorphism.

Look at that face! It's like she's from another planet.

One last shot before letting her back in the river to find that log again.

Now that was a fun day of turtling. The only thing that detracted from the fun of jumping in a river and finding amazing turtles on a beautiful day were all the snags and brush piles we didn't search because of these trot lines:

Trot lines are fishing lines anchored between stationary objects (like between two otherwise turtlicious snags) and strung with a series of enormous hooks descending from the main line. The idea is that you bait them, leave them overnight or for the day while you sunbath on the shore, and you come back, pull in a mess of catfish, and put the lines back in your boat to take them home. The problem is that people forget about them or just leave them in there indefinitely, where they keep hooking fish, drowning turtles and shorebirds, and posing a hazard to boaters and turtlers. I was only a little afraid of alligators, but I was genuinely scared of getting snagged by one of these hooks. It sucked to see turtles jump off a log, to know that we could probably find them in there if we tried, but that we weren't going to be feeling around all those rusty old hooks underwater. Scott and I had a simultaneous heart attack at one point when we were walking side-by-side back downstream, and we hit, at the same time, a line some moron had strung across the current of the river, like the fisherman would be the only person ever traversing that stretch of river. We very gingerly backed off it and headed for shore to go around it.

Curious about what map turtles eat? Here's a shot of a pile of clam shells, I think all Corbicula species. This is a genus of Asian clams that is sort of taking over the rivers of our continent, likely to the detriment of our 300+ species of native mussels. Map turtles, particularly the hefty female broad-heads, eat mussels, but they also apparently dig the clams, so it's a wash for them, even if it's a small biodiversity crisis otherwise.

I'll close with a concession to people who dig invertebrates (in particular Ted of Beetles in the Bush, who identified the species), a common shore tiger beetle that was dancing around in large numbers on the sand under the bridge (nice to get a descriptive name like that - common? Yep. by the shore? Yep.):

2012-01-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

Attention Philly Herpers! Check out this lecture at the Free Library on the the Philadelphia Zoo's efforts to protect the herps (and other animals and plants) of Haiti:

Event info:

A Vanishing Kingdom: Tracing the Origins of the Environmental Destruction of Haiti

Monday, January 30, 7:00 P.M.

Free Library of Philadelphia, Parkway Central Library, Skyline Room, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-7710

Join Dr. Garvey Lundy of Montgomery County Community College and Dr. Carlos Martinez Rivera of the Philadelphia Zoo as they explore how social conditions in Haiti affect the island’s flora and fauna, and how, in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, the Philadelphia Zoo is working to establish conservation strategies to save more than 40 plant and animal species native to the island. For more information on One Book events, visit freelibrary.org/onebook.

2012-01-22T16:28:00.000-08:00

This is not directly a herping post, but I'd like to announce our newly adopted daughter, Magnolia Elizabeth Brown (Homo sapiens), born December 11th and whom we brought home a few days later. It'll be at least a couple years till she's flipping rocks with her old man, and I imagine fatherhood might keep me closer to home in my herping expeditions (though Scott has demonstrated impressive mobility in his fatherhood). Soon enough, though, I look forward to introducing her to the local frogs, toads, snakes, salamanders, and turtles (heck, maybe even some lizards).

2012-01-22T07:58:00.000-08:00

The first river we tried, after a miserably long drive from Philadelphia and a few hours of sleeping in a rest stop in Florida, was a tributary of the Apalachicola, a gorgeous, clear-water, turtle-icious tributary of the Apalachicola, and thus territory of Barbour's map turtle (G. barbouri).

Turtle number one was not a map turtle, but it was darn cute, a loggerhead musk turtle (Sternotherus minor). We ended up seeing a lot of these basking low to the water on the smaller branches and twigs sticking above the surface. The first one held still in Scott's hand just long enough for this shot...
...and then leaped from his hand like the most quick and agile turtle we had ever seen. Luckily there were more.

We kept on wading, snorkeling, diving along the bottom. A larger turtle caught our eye, and we caught the turtle. Meet one of the omnipresent yellow-bellied sliders of the Southeast (Trachemys scripta), close cousin of the red-eared sliders that are a pest in our Delaware Valley waters.

Of course there are snakes down there too. Several species of water snake (Nerodia species) hunt the waters of the Florida panhandle, but what we hear that most of the water snakes in these clear, spring-fed streams are brown water snakes (N. taxispilota) like this little one.

Though we did not catch one of those massive-headed female map turtles, we did come up with a couple males basking.

2012-01-14T05:43:00.000-08:00

Scott and I were planning a big sweep of the Southeast to find eleven map turtle (Graptemys) species, including all the broad-headed species and all the sawbacks. But that didn't seem like a reason I couldn't make other trips down South to look for map turtles. Call it scouting.

In June I noticed how many credit card points and hotel points I had, and in an hour of playing around online I had booked a flight, rental car, and hotel rooms for nearly nothing, all in the cause of herping.

One challenge of this kind of herping is that there are few large airports central to the Gulf-area map turtle distributions. Atlanta is too far northeast, Memphis too far northwest, New Orleans at the southwest corner of where I wanted to be. I chose Montgomery, AL, and decided to start out the trip heading west into Mississippi.

The first sign that this was a bad initial decision was the parade of towering thunderheads and curtains of rain I drove through on my way out of Alabama. It was an awesome sight to behold at dusk: cliffs of roiling dark clouds back-lit in pink and purple by the setting sun, but the rain, probably good for terrestrial herping, was bad news for snorkeling. However the rivers looked the day before, they'd look a lot bigger and muddier after that rain.

...which is exactly what I found the next morning on a tributary of the Pascagoula (thus looking for gibbonsi and flavimaculata). I paddled the Raftemys upstream, heartened early by this river cooter (Pseudemys concinnus) working through a riffle.

Note a pretty turtle, but it was a turtle.

I saw some other turtles (map turtles?) slip off of far-off snags as I went, and I finally pulled the Raftemys over at a nice sandbank opposite a steeper cut bank on a bend in the river for a snorkeling attempt. The sand showed more evidence of turtles:

I strapped on the mask, got the mouthpiece in, and slipped into the water.

I couldn't see anything. I couldn't see my hand more than six inches in front of my face. I could only see brown. What was that brown?

Well, I thought about that question while I was immersed in it. A good deal of it was soil from the surrounding uplands. I had seen a lot of that soil exposed in overgrazed cattle pasture on my way to the put-in from the hotel, and soil wasn't all I saw those fields that could be washed into the water with me. I got out, thinking of all the interesting livestock pathogens I had steeped in.

I did drive around and visit other rivers I had looked at online from satellite images; all of them were similarly muddy. Scouting indeed.

That evening I drove back into Alabama, stopping for dinner at my herping restaurant of choice:

Small towns in the South do Dairy Queen right.

The next morning I tried two tributaries of the Escambia River, which in Alabama is called the Conecuh. The first spot was a little on the murky side (in retrospect, not bad at all now that I've done a lot more of this kind of snorkeling) so I tried another tributary. I saw little farmland or pasture around this particular river on satellite images, and it showed in the water. The USGS Water Data website later showed that the river flow had jumped before I got in it, but the water was still nearly crystal clear.

I did not take the Raftemys. The current was swift but the river was shallow, so it looked like miserable paddling but plausible picking my way along the banks. The river flows through a very deeply incised ravine, with green forested hillsides rising above to either side. This makes for beautiful scenery - the rest of the world disappears (there are a lot of reasons to hate the automobile, but another one is the way we so quickly pass above creeks and rivers on bridges; the landscape's most beautiful features might as well not be there), but it also makes for a shady river. The sun needs to be at a steep angle to warm the branches that turtles like to bask on, so I didn't see any until I hit an east-west bend.

There I saw what I had been looking for, a decent-sized turtle with a peaked shell slide off a snag by the bank. I found a secure spot to leave what I wouldn't be bringing into the water, changed out of my shoes, put on the flippers, and slid in myself.

I immediately found the heaven I had been looking for. The bottom dropped away to a channel about eight or ten feet deep, and I could see all the way down. Small fish hovered around me, and below me turtles looked back up from beneath a tangle of submerged branches.

These were the wrong kind of turtle, more river cooters, clean ones with rich shell patterns and long claws. Not that there's anything wrong with them (indeed Scott and I would later discover how beautiful these cooters are), but I was looking for the plain carapace and leaf-edge outline of a large female Escambia River map turtle (G. ernsti), which I finally found beneath one of those submerged logs.

Look at that head!

I played around some more in that channel, drifting downstream with my head upstream, my legs working to keep me steady in position, and diving down here and there to get my head down and investigate features on the bottom.

Good thing I did, since I soon spotted the smaller leaf-outline shell of a male Escambia River map turtle tucked alongside a submerged branch. Here's the little beauty.

Could you believe that both this guy and the enormous female are adults? The two sexes of the larger map turtle species lead separate lives. They often prefer different stretches of water (the females deeper pools) and they eat different food: the females crush mussels and clams while the males crunch insects and worms.

After this I drove back to Montgomery, where in a major failure of planning I didn't have a pre-determined set of spots to explore enough around the rivers there before my afternoon flight home (to be fair, I didn't feel quite like getting on a plane while I was still drying off).

2012-01-07T04:14:00.000-08:00

I have developed a full-blown obsession with map turtles (Graptemys - the genus name translates into just that, map-turtle). This would not be a problem if I lived near lots of map turtles, say in the Florida panhandle (also known as Heaven) or better yet, Mississippi (six species) or Alabama (at least six). Up here in the Delaware Valley we should have zero species of map turtles, though we're lucky to enjoy a population of common/northern map turtles (G. geographica - again, what a neat scientific name!), native to PA's central and western rivers, but apparently introduced in the Delaware just above the fall line a hundred years ago or so. Since then they have spread up the river (common now in the Water Gap), down the river (showing up now and then at the Heinz NWR), and back up the Schuylkill at least as far as Valley Forge.

Now, I adore the common map turtles - see my snorkeling posts going back a couple years - but someone with a full blown obsession is not satisfied to enjoy the one variety of the object of his obsession that happens to be convenient. No, the obsession does not permit such easy satisfaction, it demands comprehensive commitment to maximization, and there are thirteen species of map turtles and two or three more subspecies, depending how you count them:

Northern map turtle: G. geographica, the one we've got up here. The carapace (top shell) is patterned with fine green and orange lines like roads and borders on a map. These guys inhabit the northeast quarter of the country, from Wisconsin over to Upstate New York and down to North Georgia.
False map turtle: G. pseudogeographica, a funny specific name if you look at it without reference to the geographica. What does it mean to be pseudo-geographic? You could count two subspecies, basically northern vs. southern sections of the Mississippi River system. The northern one is G. p. pseudogeographica, the southern G. p. kohni.
Black-knobbed map turtle: G. nigrinoda, a nicely descriptive name for a turtle with prominent black knobs running down its back. Along with the next two 'sawback' species, these have relatively small heads and have a relatively insect-oriented diet. They live mostly below the fall line in the rivers that flow into the Mobile Bay and share their waters with the Alabama map turtle. These have been traditionally divided into two subspecies, with the darker-colored turtles that live close to the Mobile Bay as G. n. delticola.
Yellow-blotched map turtle: G. flavimaculata, another descriptive title. These live in the Pascagoula system below the fall line, and share it with the Pascagoula map turtle.
Ringed map turtle: G. oculifera, a scientific name a little more evocative ('eyed' map turtle) than the common name. These live in the Pearl River system below the fall line, sharing their habitat with the Pearl River map turtle.
Barbour's map turtle: G. barbouri, a one of the broad-headed species; three of the four broad-headed species have boring, place or honorific names. It's nice to honor a great herpetologist like Barbour (and Ernst, and Gibbons), but why not something more descriptive or evocative, like 'Snail-Crushing' map turtle, or 'Beefy-Headed' map turtle? These four species have such freakishly enormous heads that it's a crime to ignore them in the species names. Barbour's map turtles live in the Chattahoochee/Apalachicola River system.
Escambia River map turtle: G. ernsti, in the Escambia River system.
Alabama map turtle: G. pulchra, which means 'beautiful,' a perplexing species name since they're pretty bland-looking map turtles. They live in the same rivers as the black-knobs, but range further up above the fall line, the same pattern that you see with the Pascagoula and Pearl River map turtles.
Pascagoula map turtle: G. gibbonsi
Pearl River map turtle: G. pearli, a species very recently split from G. gibbonsi based on genetic differences and very subtle pattern differences.
Ouachita map turtle: G. ouachitensis, a narrow-headed species that ranges through much of the Mississippi River system, from Louisiana to Wisconsin. The Sabine River map turtle (G. o. sabinensis) lives, guess where?
Texas map turtle: G. versa, of the Colorado River system in Texas. These guys have pretty orange spots on either side of their lower jaw.
Cagle's map turtle: G. caglei, of the Guadalupe River system in Texas, a species with an intricate pattern of fine green lines - very pretty.

I had a goal last spring, a goal that didn't seem as crazy at the time as it does right now, to find and catch if I could all eleven of the thirteen species that live in the Mississippi system and east. If you look at a map (the geographic-representational kind) it's a pretty simple task, right? You've got western Florida over to southern Louisiana and back up to Pennsylvania. The two species out in Texas might be another trip. The next few posts will be an account of my attempts to reach this goal.

Technique: Readers of this blog probably have noted by now my disdain for road cruising and my tolerance, at best, for driving around from trash-site to trash-site to flip critter. I like immersion herping: hiking up into mountains, slogging through swamps, and, most immersive of all, sinking down into rivers with mask and snorkel to find turtles. Readers also will recall my dear inflatable kayaks. Put it all together and you've got my turtling method: paddle or slog my way up or down rivers looking for juicy spots to jump in and snorkel.

Not just any spot on the river would work, however. First, the spot had to be accessible; a stretch of river might look great on the map, but if no roads or bridges cross it I can't get in it. Second, the water had to be clear enough for me to see turtles. This was often hard to discern, no matter how hard I tried to interpret the USGS water statistics (I've been spoiled by the very direct turbidity readings for the Delaware and the Schuylkill, absent for most Southern rivers), and a few times we (along with Scott) walked down to the bank of a turtle-rich river to find a torrent of brown or green water in which we couldn't make out our hands in front of our masks, let alone a turtle under a log on the bottom of the river. Third, and connected to the second point, the weather had to cooperate. Rain and the ensuing runoff washes silt (and manure, God knows what else) into the river and can turn a placid stream into a dangerous torrent. Last, and connected to the previous two points, I wanted a creek or river with a lot of forest in the immediate watershed. Rain washing off an over-grazed cow pasture or a crop field carries into the water far more soil than rain whose impact is buffered by tree canopy and then drips down to meet leaf litter and roots rather than bare soil.

Is this enough background? Stay tuned for the actual map turtling accounts, beginning with the next post.

2011-12-31T19:07:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

I'll lead with the last herping of 2011:

I was under the weather for much of our Christmas trip to Roswell, GA (northern suburb of Atlanta) and the days I felt like going out it rained. Indeed right now my camera is somewhere in the care of the United States Postal Service on its way back from Paula and James' house. What does that have to do with the rain? Well, I had left the camera in the pocket of the rain jacket that James had lent me when we ventured out with their son to see what salamanders we might see in the creek that runs by their house. Unfortunately the same rain that compelled me to wear that jacket had swollen the creek to a chocolatey torrent, interesting to behold but nothing we could flip rocks in.

But on our last day there, with a flight to catch in the afternoon, I scampered down into the ravine behind the in-laws' house to see what I could flip.

Duskies! Apparently these are firmly considered to be spotted duskies (Desmognathus conanti), now their very own species and no longer a measly subspecies of our basic northern dusky (D. fuscus). I saw one adult, dark with some reddish-brown pattern along the back and top of the tail, one itty-bitty baby with the twin rows of spots on its iridescently brown and purple back, and one mid-size dusky that just looked dark grey to me as it bolted down a hole.

That might be about the entire dusky population on that stream. I only half-kid. I measured the streams on Google Earth, and I think they might total about 250 yards of stream leading into a man-made lake, all of it cut off from any other streams to which these duskies might travel or from which they might receive new blood.

2011-12-20T12:16:00.000-08:00

However bummed I am about the lack of turtles this time of year, I can take comfort in the salamanders. I've seen some people online finding the spring ambystomid (a.k.a. 'mole') salamanders like spotteds (Ambystoma maculatum) moving a bit early (I figure our buckets of rain this year have drawn them out early in some cases), and that motivated me to head out, with my herping buddy Mike, to some spotted spots and see what we could turn up.

We did find redbacks (Plethodon cinereus), which hail from a completely different group of salamanders: slender, lungless salamanders that skip the larval stage and lay eggs on land. The ambystomids do their thing in the water, and their eggs hatch into aquatic larvae that develop in that water for a few months before striking off into the woods to find a cozy burrow. Here's a pretty typical redback.

Here is a pretty typical redback response to being asked to hold still for a photo:

At another spot, near where Scott and I helped out with the salamander road crossing this past spring, we decided to see if the spotteds had been near enough to the surface to find, and to see if there was enough water to breed in (if you're a salamander).

Nope, and nope, though we did turn up this little cutie, an itty-bitty baby four-toed salamander (Hemidactylium scutatus).

These guys look just enough like redbacks to make me think, each time I flip one, 'something ain't quite right with that redback,' for a split second, until it dawns on me that the redback that is too rough-textured, too coppery, with too short a snout and a tail that pinches off a bit at the base, is not a redback. The four-toe's most obvious distinguishing feature is its belly, an opaque white with black polka dots.

And here's one more redback ('leadback' phase) for good measure:

Next time you read/hear/see me kvetching about the lack of turtles, remind me that there are salamanders to be found.

2011-12-17T19:42:00.000-08:00

This will be the first of the frustrated winter herping posts. I know, it isn't quite winter yet, and I should wait until it's been weeks since I've seen a live herp, but I keep riding out along the Schuylkill River and reflexively examining logs and whatnot for basking turtles, even though it's in the 40s. What's frustrating is that they're in there somewhere; it's not like turtles fly south for the winter.

2011-12-12T19:24:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving isn't usually a time for herping, at least in the Delaware Valley, but we were in North Carolina. My sister's boyfriend's parents retired to eastern North Carolina, near the Croatan National Forest. They rented a beach house on Emerald Isle and invited us all down.

Now, this was a family trip, not a herping trip, and even if the Croatan is a herping playground, the fall weather was still kind of chilly (rising from the 50s into the low 60s while we were there). I was tempted to hike along freely through the woods looking for basking snakes, but the weather also included hordes of men with guns and dogs hanging out on all the dirt roads. The men with the guns stayed on the roads; this was baffling to us, since we think of hunting as either active walking around or hiding in habitat. Finally a ranger explained that they were letting their dogs run around until they flushed something (it sounded like everything was in season) after which they'd hike in and shoot it.

We decided against wading through the vegetation like a deer, or a bear, or (anything else the dogs might bark at and draw fire) and stuck to the roads, watching the canals. This was not a random idea; a few years ago on a herping trip (in warmer, wetter weather) we found lots of fun critters in those canals, spotting cottonmouths (Agkistrodon piscivorous), various turtles, and oodles of frogs.

Here are some shots of the canals...

... and here is a shot of a lake.

All that we found was the mystery cooter, with a redbelly (Pseudemys rubriventris) as a lead candidate.

2011-12-04T18:29:00.000-08:00

I'm a little backed-up on some Grid writing assignments, so forgive the delayed post yet to come. This is just a round of...

NAME THAT COOTER!

That's not nearly as dirty as you might be thinking. Cooters are a group of water turtles in the genus Pseudemys. The Delaware Valley's redbellies are a cooter (P. rubriventris), for example. This one was basking in a large ditch along a dirt road in the Croatan National Forest in eastern North Carolina, near a large lake and a whole lot of the shrubby wetland they call 'pocosin.'

Three species of cooter occur in this section of NC. They've got river cooters, but this this was no river. They've got redbellies, which do live in slower water (think of all those ponds/bogs in the Pine Barrens), but it looks too yellow and, to my eye, a little too flat in profile. That leaves the Florida cooter (P. floridana), a slower-water species with a yellow belly.

Let me know what you think.

2011-11-24T15:39:00.000-08:00

The Raftemys 2 has arrived!

2011-11-20T15:18:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I headed back to our favorite marsh to see if I might be able to score a November spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata). I was depending on the sun to break through, on the cloudy part of the 'partly cloudy' forecast to be really small and positioned to one side or the other of the sun.

That took a while. I slogged through the sedge marsh, starkly beautiful in a way, even without much in the way of life.

Indeed here is some evidence of death, at least for the bird.

I switched to the woods, checking out a spring that I thought might yield some salamanders.

Nope.

It did yield a pickerel frog (Rana palustris), kind of the redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus) of the marsh; when you find nothing else, there will be pickerel frogs.

To be fair I did hear a few spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer) singing their stubborn little hearts out.

When the sun finally did come out, I headed back to a spot Scott and I have identified as a spotted turtle hibernaculum. It's a wet meadow, which means it looks like grass with a few puddles here and there, but sink in to your knees (at least) when you step off the trail. The turtles particularly like this old stump, and I did hear a turtle-scale plop when I leaned over to see what I could see. This might not look like much to you, but what you're seeing is a shroud of tear-thumb (an aptly named vine) spread over dead rose briars. If I had seen the turtle I would have reached for it, but I like the skin on my arm too much to feel around blindly in there.

I saw a barely-surfaced turtle dive in a deep spot of that meadow, where the turtles winter beneath the tangled lip of a dead tree's root mass. I did feel around after it for a moment, but came up with nothing but a numb hand.

2011-11-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

Dearly beloved, we gather to mourn the loss of a fine herping companion, delighted to bathe in the murky waters of our beloved Schuylkill River, content to be tossed around by luggage handlers en route to sunnier streams, gracious enough to hold me and assorted gear as we paddled around in search of turtles.

On my most recent Southern turtling trip the Raftemys suffered a mortal wound, a seam ripped open by an insidious submerged branch, a vengeful snag that, as I eased upstream to examine the branches above the water, tore her open below.

A sudden torrent of bubbles alerted me to her trauma, and we limped back downstream. I contacted the company (Sea Eagle, this is a SE 330) but they said there is no way to repair a ripped seam like that. Patches won't hold.

In exchange for a photo to demonstrate the complete disabling of the vessel, they offered me a steep discount on a replacement hull, and though I am wary to buy another of a model that just failed, it's one hell of a lot cheaper than a higher-end alternative, and I'll give it one more shot (though it pained me to take a razor to her).

Tonight I will bear the deflated and rolled-up Raftemys down to our trash room and leave her in a dumpster. Perhaps she deserves a burial at sea (or at river), but I'm not sure the river or my fellow river-goers would appreciate the 30 pounds of floppy vinyl litter.

Sometime soon the Raftemys 2 will arrive by mail. Until then I will consider myself in mourning, bereft of my turtling companion.

2011-11-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

It is hard to suppress the impulse to catch. The quick transition from 'see critter' to 'grab critter' is something we drill into ourselves from childhood. I think it partly comes naturally; I mean that literally, that eons of predator evolution have included it in our basic toolbox of behaviors, but little herpers (and bigger herpers) dwell so much on the ones that got away - 'if only I had reacted faster when I saw that basking rat snake' - as punishment for herping failure that catching becomes second nature, something you don't think about as much as something you just do automatically.

To be clear, I am not going to give up catching critters. I am not a birder who can be satisfied with the simple visual stimulus. I need that tactile reward of the snake wrapping around my fist; the round, hard weight of a turtle; or the plump toad or frog filling my hand. Every now and then, however, it is nice to simply watch.

Last weekend Jen and I went for a walk in the Wissahickon Valley in search of hemlock trees for a Grid article I just finished. Of course there is more than hemlocks in the Wissahickon Valley, and here we have Jen compulsively checking under almost every log we passed.

Here is the reward, plenty of red backed salamanders (Plethodon cinereus):

I continued on, examining hemlocks for evidence of woolly adelgid infestation. Jen stayed back, relaxing by the creek. She called a few minutes later: she had found a snake.

I turned and came back running. I assumed it was in her hand, pooping all over the place and scaring the nice walkers, joggers, and cyclists on Forbidden Drive.

No, the garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) was soaking up the sun on this crisp autumn day. I suppose I could have picked it up, but it looked so comfortable that I just left it there in the sun.

2011-11-05T06:25:00.001-07:00

I apologize for another gap in the blog. I've been traveling again, driven by a turtling obsession to go South again. Now I'm back in the cooling Northeast. I have no herping trips to show for myself since I've been back. I would ordinarily save an account like this for the cold, hard, frozen winter, but with the season winding down, why not jump ahead of the schedule by a couple months.

Last weekend I found myself paddling upstream in a stretch of river in the Pascagoula system in southern Mississippi. I was by myself and had only one car, so if I wanted to check out a river, this was the only way to do it: fight upstream and cruise back down. In this case it certainly was a fight. The current wasn't terribly strong, but the wind was, and the two together gave me no breaks from paddling.

At some point early on I had to pee. I don't know if I really had to go all that badly or if it was a good excuse to take a break, but I headed for the bank to my left. For those unfamiliar with this sort of river, the banks generally alternate between (on the inside of curves) gentle slopes that often meet the river with enormous sandy beaches, and (on the outside of curves) steep, bluff-like banks cut sharply down through the sand and clay sediments. I was headed for the steep bank; it was closer, and there was a flatter lip that I could hop out onto.

This is what I saw as I drew closer:

Yep, that's a frumpy little three-toes box turtle (Terrapene carolina) sitting at the base of the bank. Here she is in more detail.

I regarded her as a sort of a post turtle. I suspected that she had no idea how to get out of that situation by herself, and I was powerfully tempted to help her out. I did suspect that she got there by herself, tumbling down the bank by accident or climbing down at an easier spot, and then getting a bit lost and stuck, similar to their problems with train tracks (box turtles sometimes climb into the space between the rails on train tracks and then can't get back out). Box turtles will dig down into the bottoms of puddles and marshy spots, and they will also burrow into leaf litter and other dead vegetation, but a steep bank next to the water? I saw nowhere she could go except into the water, and no easy way to get down there. True, box turtles are better climbers than we give them credit for (I've read about them climbing out of outdoor pens), but this was slippery stuff with a curled-over lip of moss and vegetation at the top, and I just didn't see her climbing out.

I contemplated a hook shot, an easy lob up and over, but that seemed a bit dangerous; I didn't want her landing on her back and unable to right herself. Down the bank maybe fifty yards there was a shallower slope to the bank. I decided to give her a ride in the Raftemys.

I should emphasize that I was not taking her very far. Box turtles are generally homebodies. Most spend their lives in an area about the size of a football field, and if you take them out of that area, they dedicate themselves to getting home. This is a problem when a well-meaning motorist finds a boxie crossing the road in their subdivision and decides to do it a favor by relocating it to a park a couple miles away. That box turtle will most likely start hiking in search of home, exhausting itself, not eating well, exposing itself to predators and car tires along the way. If it's lucky it makes it back to the same subdivision it was rescued from, and if it is unlucky it dies along the way. The lesson? Don't move a box turtle more than you need to in order to get it out of immediate harm's way. I figured the fifty yards or so (I'm terrible with distances, but it looked about half a football field away) might take her out of home range, but it would be close enough to find her way back.

Here she is in the boat with me.

And here she is at farewell, trundling into the underbrush.

If I was right about her predicament, then I saved her life. If I was wrong, well, she had a day or two of hiking to get back to where she started.

2011-10-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I engaged in a one of my regular exercises in futility: searching for milksnakes under the rocks of Northwest Philadelphia.

I date the beginning of my writing about herping to May of 2005. On that cool, cloudy evening (about 7:30pm) I was flipping rocks on a hillside above the Wissahickon, when under a hefty slab of rock I found not centipedes, not ants, not pill bugs nor crickets, not even a redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus) - all somber-hued creatures that blend in with the soil, stone, and dead leaves - but a vividly crimson and cream little beauty of a milksnake. It felt like a dream, finding something so unexpected and gorgeous, and I felt the need to post about it on a field herping forum that I no longer frequent. I don't think that post drew a single follow-up, which motivated me to launch this blog. I know that sounds backward, that the lack of response spurred me to write about a topic, but I was thinking more along the lines of 'to hell with you rattlesnake-obsessed Californians, I'm going to write about herping on my own damn website.'

For the rest of that season into the next couple years, I went back to that same hillside as well as others in the area, thinking that thar be milksnakes, I could go out and just flip some more.

Nope, that was not the case. Eventually this turned into an absurd ritual as it became clear that finding that first milksnake was an incredibly lucky fluke.

In the meantime, non-herper friends have unintentionally mocked me as they have sent me photos or other accounts of their own milksnake finds in that same area. Just a couple months ago a friend sent me this photo:

Here's a DOR from near the Upper Roxborough Reservoir (where they do the Toad Detour):

Here's a road jerky specimen (I think I only just threw this away a few months ago after keeping it in a drawer) from a couple years ago. Scott found it next to the car after we had concluded another unsuccessful expedition:

So, this is why I keep heading up to the far northwest corner of our fair city, to strain some more ligaments in my back and find lots of things that aren't milksnakes.

Here is a typical rock, one of hundreds (thousands?) at this spot:

As per usual in the fall (and spring), redback salamanders were out in force:

A rustling in the leaves alerted me to this hefty toad (Bufo americanus). I find a plump toad like this really satisfying. There's something comforting about having it fill your hand instead of having to handle it gingerly with your finger tips.

I did flip a snake. Here it is, twelve inches of puffing, pooping, biting garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis). This is not the first garter I've found under a rock in that part of town, but it is the first for that particular hillside.

2011-10-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

Turtles About Town

I got my turtle fix over the weekend. I went on a Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) nature walk at the John Heinz NWR on Saturday (thanks to ranger Mariana Bergerson for a great tour). The weather was crisp and sunny, and that was enough to bring out the turtles.

The first two we spotted were red-eared sliders (RES - Trachemys scripta), descendents of released pets of a species native to the middle part of the country, not the Delaware Valley. RES are kind of like the methadone of turtle fixes. They ease the craving but don't quite get you high. Maybe if they looked better they'd hit the spot, but they're such basic turtles that, as they get older, end up rough and dull looking.

Here's a mystery turtle that I think is an RES.

The real release came with a proper Delaware Valley turtle, a hefty red-bellied turtle (Pseudemys rubriventris) basking with some smaller turtles that I think are the same species. There is a lot of concern that the RES are pushing out our red-bellies. RES are getting more common; our beefy red-bellies are growing scarce. Cause and effect, or both effects of a common cause (for example that RES might thrive better than red-bellies with human-altered habitat)?

It was satisfying as well to see some painted turtles (Chrysemys picta), the girl next door of our native turtles, the one who you see so often that you forget how pretty it is until one day you look and...

The Heinz NWR might be the most dramatic wild landscape in Philadelphia; Concourse Lake sits on the other end of the majesty spectrum. This is an artificial pond in Fairmont Park West dating to the Centennial celebrations of 1876. There are some snappers (Chelydra serpentina) in there, and catching one is high on my priority list for 2012, but the turtles you see most often are the RES.

I want to send out a hearty congratulations to Fairmount Park (or Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, now that they've merged) for a job well done here. They took an ugly, foul, decrepit pond that even I was scared to touch and re-paved the paths, added a lot of attractive native plants, dredged out one side of the pond to make it deeper, and left the dredged fill on the other side to create a wetland area. Apparently the Canada geese like to rip out the plugs of native wetland plants they use to get the vegetation started, forcing the landscapers/restorers to use tightly arrayed fencing to keep the geese out:

2011-10-11T19:32:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I tried a long shot of a trip, and I came back with a photo of a pickerel frog (Rana palustris). Pickerel frogs were all over the place, hopping into the little streams through the wet woods and some of the deeper water in the marsh. Coming away with a photo of a pickerel frog was kind of like flipping a redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus) or a birder coming home with a photo of a robin.

I had gone out in the same sort of spirit that took me up a mountain in the fog. Sure it's fun to find what you're looking for in perfect conditions, but it's a special triumph to find what you're looking for in bad conditions. Of course the down side of a low-probability/high reward strategy is that most of the time you strike out. In particular this was a trip to see if I might find spring species in the fall - similar weather, of course, but I found even less than I expected.

The lack of painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) was just plain eerie. They're a constant in the spring and summer here, slipping into the water as you approach, popping their little heads up to watch you in this particular stretch of water.

2011-09-30T17:08:00.000-07:00

Today in the car I noticed a small snake shed in the center console, and then I accidentally dropped it between the console and the seat. Maybe we'll find it the next time we vacuum out the car.

Tony Croasdale, naturalist, environmental educator, field biologist, and birder extraordinaire, had pocketed the shed as we were very gingerly hiking around a rookery spot in the mountains, a spot where gravid female timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus) spend the summer basking, give birth, spend a week or two with the babies, and then when the babies shed the party sort of breaks up. The females wander away, drifting back to the den where they spend the winter, and the babies follow behind. The shed...

...was from one of the little babies, a few of which we saw catching some rays.

Only one adult was hanging around, and it looked absolutely awful.
Of course it was too thin, and look at that eye. Dear lord. I really was tempted to take it home, drain that thing, and get it some antibiotics, but I don't think it was worth the mortal risk, I didn't have anything to take it home in, and I'd be breaking the law.

We saw a couple healthier adults a few hundred yards away, near where I think they spend the winter. They weren't easy to spot (saw them on either the second or third pass by that rock), but I saw one either withdrawing or thinking about coming out - hard to tell.

See it? (yes this is one of those annoying 'find the snake' photos)

Here's the other one, resting its head on a leaf, and basking with just its front few inches.

We did one more walk that I really should have planned differently. Never leave the mile-long, steep, uphill part for the end of the day, when you're already exhausted but have no choice but hike out to get to your car.

We saw next to nothing on this schlep, but here's a cute skink (Eumeces fasciatus) hunting around this boulder.

2011-09-24T05:14:00.001-07:00

I'm stubborn this time of year about going out and seeing rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus). Partly this is because it's a great time to see baby rattlers (cute!), partly because the temperatures are falling and we know that reptile time is almost over. I might be snorkeling for turtles, but August and September's repeated soakings have kept our waters high and murky.

Last Sunday I went back to the site of timbers in the mist, and (to kill any suspense) I found pretty much nothing. This was one of those trips where I cover a LOT of ground, way down a ridge, and then working back, up and down the slope. If there had been a lot of rattlers out, I am confident I would have seen them (since I always assume I see at most half the rattlers that are out, maybe I missed a few).

Back at where in June I had chilled out on a talus slope above a basking timber, I found a shed skin. Here are some shots of the shed.

Here is a shot of that snake from June (from the other side of the slope; I photographed the shed from just on the other side of where the snake was sitting in this shot).

Now, here is a shot of the outcropping where I had seen three all piled up in June...

...and where I had seen the two hanging out in the fog a few weeks ago...

...and here a different angle:

There was no way I could photograph the enormity of this cliff from the base of the slope. A jumble of furniture-sized slabs preceded the cliff as I hiked up to the first of a series of fifteen foot rock faces. I would have needed to back up a hundred yards or so, but that would have put a hundred yards of forest between me and the base of the cliff, making for a shot basically of trees with a little rock poking through.

Did I try to climb it? Of course I did! With the angel on my shoulder shouting loudly into my ear about how bad an idea this was, I tried to reach the first ledge up. I small slip later and a glance down at the multi-ton slabs scattered below convinced me to give up and keep hiking.

2011-09-21T17:01:00.000-07:00

I have been taking a few longer exercise rides to work lately, heading out the West River Drive to the Falls Bridge and back in to Center City (rather than straight east from W. Philly to Center City). For the non-Philadelphians reading this, this means riding out along the Schuylkill River and back the other side. Almost every day I've done this lately, the Schuylkill River has been high and muddy or the skies have been cool and cloudy, poor conditions for turtle basking, especially at 8:30 in the morning. Still, this morning I saw a few of them squeezed onto a small log remaining on the east bank by the Falls Bridge (no camera). I wanted to catch them. I want to catch them. But the river is still murky for my taste, and I doubt the rain this weekend will help.

2011-09-18T05:26:00.000-07:00

I'd like to lodge a weather complaint. Of course I'll need to get behind everyone else, the people whose lives have been upended by the floods Upstate. I'm content to take my deservedly distant place in line, but I am still frustrated by the rainy weather and the rivers and streams running like chocolate milk. For a guy obsessed with finding turtles, particularly turtles in the water, this has been frustrating stuff to work with.

Here's a picture of the tidal portion of the Schuylkill from last weekend.

Even now, a week later, the Schuylkill and the Delaware are way above their mean and median flow for this time of year.

I found no herps on that outing but from the 34th St. Bridge I did engage this hawk in a staring contest.

2011-09-11T05:11:00.001-07:00

Timbers in the Mist

You can't find rattlesnakes sitting in your living room (unless you keep them as pets, in which case the possibility of finding them in your living room is a strong argument against keeping hots), so on Labor Day I got out of bed early, packed my rain poncho, and headed for the mountains. Sunday would have been the better day - lots of clouds but enough hazy sunshine filtering through to warm the skin - but on Sunday I was under the weather, getting over a virus and dealing with my own mental haze and fatigue. I needed my sleep. So, Monday it was.

I hiked the first half hour or so through the rain. I had flashbacks to my June trip on which I hurt my finger (still ain't quite right) and felt really uneasy about exploring slippery talus slopes and rocky outcroppings (think small cliffs). Maybe I should bring my water shoes for this kind of trip, but my hiking boots, in spite of their many other attributes, slide off slick rocks like they're glazed with ice.

I headed directly for an outcropping where, near the beginning of June, I had seen three timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus), all presumably females, basking together in a neat pile with a perfect view of the valley below. They just care about the temperature and hiding spots, but I still imagine them scouting nice rookery spots, and arriving at this one to say, "sure it's a slog to get to, but look at the view!"

That's what I said, even in the fog that enveloped the mountainside once the rain let up. Of course I was assuming I'd see no rattlesnakes. 'Basking in the fog' is oxymoronic, no? Basking presumes solar radiation to absorb, and the light from my camera flash barely made it through the mists to light up subjects twenty feet away, but somehow, for reasons only the rattlers know, I had subjects to light up.

(with flash)
(without)

Who am I to tell the rattlers how they should bask? I didn't see the oodles of rattlers I probably would have seen on Sunday (when I would have covered a LOT more rocky ground), but the observation of timbers hanging out in the fog like it was the most natural thing in the world? It kind of works out as a trade.

Look at how huge she is. I wasn't sure if they would have given birth yet when I got out of my car, but I bet she'll be dropping her litter very soon.

After these girls I headed back for the car (albeit by a route that let me check out some overgrown clearings and a boggy area, from which one lonely spring peeper called out into the fog). And, of course, when I got back to the car, the sun burned through, just enough for that warm, hazy light that's 'perfect' for rattlesnakes.

Here are some other tidbits:

A fuzzy caterpillar (there were a lot of these out) that headed towards me ominously as I sat admiring the snakes.

Shrubs that I simply call 'shin busters.'

Requisite newt (Nopthalmus viridiscens) in a puddle, since if it's raining in the mountains, you know at least you'll find newts.

Here are some chestnuts for the tree fans out there:

And a bird? This adorable blue-throated, black warbler checked me out as I watched the snakes (first the caterpillar, then the warbler). This was the best photo I took, good enough for my friend and avid birder (and we're still friends - crazy, I know) Tony Croasdale to ID the cutie.

2011-09-04T06:40:00.001-07:00

I'm feeling bad about how long it's been since I posted anything. I recently went on a big turtling adventure, and since then haven't been out much - a mix of being busy and weather that kept me inside. I swear I'll make it out this weekend yet, maybe one quick Philly trip to visit some brown snakes and one out to the mountains, but in the meantime I thought I'd post three teaser turtles. I like to post about the trips out of the region during the winter when I've got not much else to write about, so please wait until the ground freezes for the full accounts, but here are three turtles, each of which was a lot of fun to find, photograph, and, of course, immediately release.

See if you can't identify them on your own (looking at the file names is cheating), and win some turtle cred points. Turtle cred points are redeemable for absolutely nothing except for the respect and admiration of your fellow herpers.

Happy Herping!

2011-08-21T13:20:00.001-07:00

I got my first leech bite a couple weeks ago. Actually I got two. They weren't all that bad, but leeches are the last local parasite (I still fear exotic parasites, such as the blowfly larvae that grow in your skin) I hadn't been bitten by yet, and I've been embarrassingly squeamish about them. I've gotten plenty macho about picking off ticks, catching mosquitoes in midair, and swatting at deer and horse flies. Even the fearsome chiggers of South Jersey don't exactly scare me, even though I'll do everything I can to avoid them (and thank God for permethrin). Leeches gave me the willies, but no more!

The leeches found me as I was helping with an event at a local marsh where Scott and I spend a lot of time herping. I had scratched my legs up wading through saw-edged grasses and tear thumb (tear leg in this case), and the leeches latched on as I helped clear some exotic/invasive reed canary grass. Here's a post-leech shot of my leg an hour later, still not quite done bleeding.

Here's a shot of Scott wrangling a painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) that we used for an educational demonstration later.

I'll wrap up with a very happy looking bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) basking on a patch of canary grass next to the creek. I won't grant frogs intelligence, but I'll recognize that they feel some of the same pleasures we do, in this case the base contentment of soaking up the sun.

2011-08-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

Gone Turtling

2011-08-14T07:58:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I participated in a clean up event in the Philadelphia side of the Mount Moriah Cemetery (learn more about other clean up events here) but didn't have the opportunity on that trip to find any of my beloved brown snakes (Storeria dekayi). Last weekend I made it back to see who I could find.

I found a lot of where there used to be trash piles, evidence of the recent cleanup. All these were spots that might have hosted brown snakes just a few weeks before. Now they are presumably back in the weeds where it is a lot harder to get to them.

I did find one pile of trash that escaped the cleaning fervor of the volunteers and City staff:

...and hidden beneath a pair of browns:

2011-08-04T16:47:00.000-07:00

When you can't stand the heat on the land, get in the water. That doesn't quite have the 'heat in the kitchen' ring to it, but it's my herping motto this time of year. Of course the trophy species for my aquatic herping right now is the map turtle (Graptemys geographica), but I also dig the so-ugly-it's-cute stinkpot (Sternotherus oderatus).

Jen and I recently hopped in the car, fleeing 100 degree temps in West Philly, and drove to a spot on the Maurice River in S. Jersey that is home to a population of introduced (though native to much of the rest of the country) spiny softshell turtles (Apalone spinifera), though I had never seen them.

I still haven't, but the stinkpots sure act like they own the place. It took very little time or effort to find this guy, even with the water a little high and a little murky.

Shayna PunimI'd still like to find a softshell. Maybe I'll try a PA spot where they've also gained a foothold.

2011-07-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

Scott recently complemented my turtling Jedi skills. I can't claim that the force is strong in me, but I have been working on my underwater stealth approach (I need to think of a better name: submarine snatch? dive and grab? drift and rip?).

We're all used to seeing turtles basking on a log or a rock in the water, and then seeing all of them drop into the water just as we get close enough to see what kind they are. If you've been canoeing or kayaking around turtles, you may have noticed that they wait a little longer to make their watery getaways. More than one herper has thought, 'what if I get even lower in the water?' 'What if I swim along as low as I can and try to grab them before they dive in?'

I'm here to tell you that it can be done. I've tried and failed at this many times in the past, and I think the problem before has been that I've used my arms too much, that I've been too high in the water. I even tried floating a log in front of me for a while, but they still dropped before I could get closer than a couple yards.

The key is flippers. The mask and snorkel are a given, but with the flippers you can kick yourself along with minimal motion above water (hands and arms submerged, of course), and swim along underwater as far as you can between breaths. This doesn't work 100% of the time, but it works enough for a good time.

It helps to keep on the other side of whatever the turtles are basking on, and the boulders in the Delaware make great cover.

Here's a map turtle (Graptemys geographica) catching some rays up on a boulder:

Here is a different turtle, in a shot I never thought I'd manage to take. I had swum up close from the other side of the boulder, and somehow she didn't see me as I got my camera a little above the surface and took the photo.

She did see me as I made my big leap out of the water to grab her, and she jumped into the water with a small male I hadn't seen initially. I popped back underwater and saw them break to my left, towards the middle of the river and deeper water (on a previous attempt, I couldn't see where the turtle went, just a puff of silt and then nothing).

It turns out that a human with flippers is faster than a turtle, or even two turtles. I caught the male with my left hand and kept kicking. I caught up with the female, and then swam back to the boulder to settle in for a brief photo session:

I let the male go first, and soon felt something crawling underneath my backside, which was loosely planted underwater on the rocks next to the basking boulder.

The trick worked perfectly with a smaller (medium-sized) female towards the end of the session. I would like to brag by pointing out how dry her shell is in this shot:

Here she is again, dipped in the water to get her pattern to show up a little better:

I had started off the session finding turtles in the traditional way, watching the turtles dive into the water as I sloshed in from shore, and finding a male who trying to hide, in this case hanging onto the vertical face of the boulder underwater.
Here's a smallish female who had decided to hide around a snag and some weeds at the bottom:

I thought she had a pretty neck.
I kept seeing some enormous mussels in the sand, and since I had recently turned in an article on mussels to run in an upcoming issue of Grid I asked a mussel researcher and she IDed it as a yellow lamp mussel, apparently rare in the Delaware.

On my march back to the car, along the Delaware and Raritan Canal, I kept an eye out for map turtles...

As well as the grander redbelly turtles (Pseudemys rubriventris) that have a habit of basking almost, but not entirely, out of the water.

This one is sharing a downed tree with a large stinkpot (Sternotherus oderatus), looking gawky, like it expects the log to roll over at any minute.

2011-07-22T14:30:00.000-07:00

I spent this morning at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Southwest Philly and I didn't even try to catch any snakes. That was tough, but there was a lot of work to do. The City of Philadelphia, together with the cemetery's friends group, put on a volunteer clean up day. As painful as it was to hack away at the wonderful brown snake (Storeria dekayi) habitat, I have long felt guilty at enjoying the decrepit state of what should be a well-kept and respectfully stately space, and I needed to get out there and do my part to make at least part of it look right.

On the way home I dropped by the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center just north of Mt. Moriah to see if I couldn't find any bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) sitting on rocks along the banks.

I saw no adult frogs, but the shallows were swimming with baby bullfrogs. There were a bunch of this year's tadpoles...

...but the toddlers were all over the place as well, legs out and almost ready to absorb those tails and hop out of the water.

(not sure what this object is, but it appears to be tadpole central)

It made me wonder where the garter and watersnakes were (Thamnophis sirtalis and Nerodia sipedon).

2011-07-16T14:18:00.000-07:00

[Sorry for the posting delay.]

I love catching snakes and turtles, but I don't eat snakes and turtles (I'm a vegetarian, but I can't imagine eating my favorite critters even if I weren't). I can't drink them either, but when I'm out herping I take note of things I can eat and, at some point, drink. I like to come back to the choke cherry trees or (if I'm really lucky) persimmons when they're in season. I also keep an eye out for black walnut trees, not to eat the nuts, but to turn them into a really yummy digestivo called nocino.

So at the beginning of the July 4th weekend I took a trip out to our favorite marsh where I had noted a bunch of accessible walnut trees. That 'accessible' part is important, since I see a lot of walnut trees with nuts I'd never be able to reach without a cherry picker. These I could reach on my tippy toes.

Of course on the way to the trees, I had to look under some nice sheet metal to find this chunky garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) who did her best viper imitation, flattening her head and puffing up to show off that really pretty blue-greenish space between her scales.

Here are some of the nuts:

I decided to pick some hickory nuts too for a variation on the usual recipe. The tree was protected by a wall of multiflora rose, but I got enough working around very, very carefully.

2011-07-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

We know the terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin) were around even if we didn't see any. We saw freshly dug holes (terrapins often dig test holes before settling on the right spot), we saw dug-up nests and nests carefully protected with cages to keep out crows, raccoons, foxes, and anything else that might dine on turtle egg, but we saw no terrapins.

We still had a great time. I brought along a couple of my younger cousins, both of whom keep snakes and dig catching toads and frogs when they get the chance. We tried a couple rounds of cruising a dirt road out into the brackish marsh but had the most fun on the trail behind the Wetlands Institute (terrapin central) in Stone Harbor, NJ.

Here are a couple nests, one lucky, one unlucky.

We might not have found many herps, but the horseshoe crabs were mating.

and hermit crabs were skittering around in the shallows.

On our last road cruising pass, we saw a pickup truck stopped, and some kids moving something across the road. It might be a cheap way to find a turtle, but we jumped out and took a look at a hefty female red-bellied turtle (Pseudemys rubriventris):

If my cousin has a pained expression on his face, it's because he is being drained of his blood by a swarm of deer flies. We jumped into the car right after this, and for the entire ride back decorated the interior with squashed fly carcasses.

2011-06-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

I'm getting a lot of questions about my finger. I've got my left pinkie buddy taped to its neighbor to let the sprain heal - something I wasn't even going to bother with until I got to work and realized that I actually do use my left pinkie a lot to type (shift).

My otherwise most expendable finger took the brunt of a slip and fall on a damp, slippery talus slope on a recent timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) trip to the mountains.

The weather called for cloudy with a chance of rain. I bet on the kind of cloudy that the sun can poke through, yielding that warm haze that brings the snakes out for long basking sessions. What I got was a fog that slicked the rocks and made for tricky hiking on the steep slope.

One of the benefits of damp weather is that it brings out the efts. These are an immature terrestrial phase of the red-spotted newt (Notopthalmus viridescens). Like almost all our amphibians they avoid the hard glare of hot sun, but a rain or otherwise damp weather can bring them out to slowly walk through the woods.

Mountain laurel were blooming:

I got to the specific rocks where I hoped to find snakes, but the clouds thoroughly blanketed the sun, and I had little to do but peek under the rocks I could pick up.

What do you know? I found a snake. It's not a rattler, rather a highly squirmy ringneck snake (Diadophis punctatus). Oddly enough I found one of its prey species, a slimy salamander (Plethodon glutinosis) one rock over.

I hiked down the slope, I hiked up the slope, I hiked back and forth on the slope, and nary a rattler did I see. I don't know how many times I slipped and caught myself, but I fell once, and got back to the first patch of rocks (where I found the ringneck) feeling battered and rejected by the mountain.

Then I heard it. The slide was one of those sounds so soft that I couldn't quite tell if I was imagining it, but I looked towards where I thought it was coming from and saw this:

It's hard to make out, but that's a timber rattler shifting position next to its basking buddy (hiding buddy in this instance) under a rock.

The finger hurts a little still, but I think it was a good trade.

2011-06-18T04:59:00.000-07:00

If Philadelphia has a wilderness, it is probably in the Northwest of the City. Up there we've got the enormous (1,400 acres, seven miles long) Wissahickon Valley section of Fairmount Park, the old reservoir in Upper Roxborough, and the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education right across the street from the reservoir. Of course as soon as I typed that I thought of the tidal marshes along the Delaware and Schuylkill, especially near the airport and the Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, so if Philadelphia has a piedmont, mixed-woods wilderness...

A week and a half ago I took a herping date as an excuse to explore the amphibians of northwest Philly on a quick after-work trip. Dusk was getting duskier, offering poor light and spurring us on to the next location before it got too dark to see, so please excuse the hurried, crappy photos:

Speaking of dusk, we turned up some dusky salamanders (Desmognathus fuscus) in the back yard of a friend. His back yard looks out on (or includes - not sure of where the line was) a wooded slope with a couple springs seeping out of the ground and joining into a cute little rocky stream. We worked our way up, flipping rocks and taking photos of what we found.

Here's a one-clawed crayfish Mike turned up. A raccoon survivor?

Here's a grown up dusky (for scale, note that these were taken in a cutoff two-liter soda bottle):

...and here's a really teeny tiny larva. Note the external gills you can just see at the ne

We stopped by the reservoir to visit with the Toad Detour folks and got to see some of this year's toadlets hopping across the road.

We finished up over at the Schuylkill Center. We checked out their newish (since I was last there, at least) pond by the parking lot, which had about as many green frogs (Rana clamitans) as I could imagine, both adults plunking away at each other and recent metamorphs crawling out of the water. Here's one of the grown ups.

2011-06-11T18:56:00.000-07:00

Last summer I started looking down into the tidal portion of the Schuylkill from the Grays Ferry bridge and decided I needed a boat. So, I got a boat.

In particular I got an inflatable Sea Eagle 'kayak.' I put that in quotation marks because it is an open vessel that you sit down in, halfway between a kayak and a canoe, but the key is that it weighs about thirty pounds and is quick to inflate and throw in the water. I have named it the Raftemys.

I took the Raftemys out on the Schuylkill a couple weekends ago, putting in around Bartram's Garden, paddling up to Walnut Street, and then back down. I had initially meant to put in right before high tide, the goal being to paddle with the tide up and then with it back out, but I ended up putting in a little late and fighting the outgoing tide for a while before I finally got to turn around and take the easy way back out.

Dig the route [it is SO nice to go somewhere and be open about the location]:

Turtles were anywhere there was vegetation along the banks and logs to haul out on.

The most common that I could tell (did I bring binoculars? Nope) were red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta):
Here's a basking party with a red-belly turtle (Pseudemys rubriventris) in the middle; the redbelly actually stayed put a few beats after the rest of his buddies had bailed.

I was happy to see some map turtles (Graptemys geographica). Don't ask me why I'm happier to see invasive map turtles than I am to see invasive sliders. I get the impression the maps aren't pushing anything else out, and I think they're more elegant turtles, whatever the slider's subspecific name (elegans).

I enjoyed the scenery from the river. The tidal Schuylkill features a lot of old docks dating back to when this was a more industrially-active river. Here's an old railroad swing bridge:

Here are some shots of Center City from the river. I had the river mostly to myself; I saw about four other boats (all with motors) and three jet skiers:

Swallows zipped above me as I paddled, and they were thick as I came up along I-76 (in the left of the last shot above). Here are a couple swallow nests underneath the expressway.

Last, here's a shot of Mill Creek.
Mill Creek once ran in a ravine through West Philly, and you can trace its path in names like the Mill Creek Farm at 49th and Brown to the Mill Creek Tavern around 42nd and Chester. Clark Park sits above the Creek, as do the perennial sink holes on Pine around 43rd. Along with the asphalt, plenty of buildings along the Creek's path have suffered damage, some torn down due to subsidence above huge culvert that now carries Mill Creek, essentially a huge storm sewer with fill still settling above it, well over a century after its entombment. Philly H2O has some great information on Philadelphia's underground waterways for those who would like to learn more.

Wouldn't it be cool to go up inside Mill Creek? I have certainly thought so, but I might be changing my mind. I saw the stream of mist issuing from the tunnel before I could see its mouth, the cool underground air condensing the heavy, humid, 90 degree air of the day.

Then I smelled and felt the air. These sensations conflicted, the cool breeze quite nice on my sweating, sun-roasting skin but the fetid stink of the storm sewer driving me past it. I can't say I won't ever hold my nose and head up the tunnel, but not on this trip.

2011-06-09T18:49:00.000-07:00

Most reptiles and amphibians are beautiful to me, but some are a stretch. Snapping turtles (Chelydra serpentina), for example, caked in mud and furry algae, tiny piggy eyes and grotesquely long claws, can't quite qualify as pretty however long I stare at them.

But the baby ones are pretty darn cute. Here's one I trapped at a local marsh - the first of two, the second of which I dropped down my right hip boot, where it latched on tight with its claws and resisted extraction with all its might.

Of course the little guy/gal is terrified, but for a few minutes I gave it a good once-over and got my shot.

On the same trip I interrupted a beaver's lunch. I was paddling and couldn't get good photos off, but here's a shot of the beaver gathering vegetation:

Here is where it had been a moment before it got away:

2011-06-06T05:32:00.000-07:00

I rarely herp in isolated places. I'm rarely on a trail, given, but I could reach one in no more than half an hour of hacking, usually less. I find rare, beautiful creatures that the vast majority of the people on those trails zip past without realizing they are there. I don't want to disparage the broader joys of hiking or boating, etc. (walking on soil and rock, surrounded by greenery and majestic vistas, or gliding over the water, hearing the paddle dip and lightly splash with each stroke) but I feel privileged to experience another level of beauty in the landscape. I imagine that all naturalists, whatever their focus, share this with me. The botany nut who can read the history of the forest in the mix of tree species and their shapes, the birder to whom the general chorus of bird calls resolves into a long attendance sheet of species calling from their respective microhabitats, the insect lover who sees the metallic black beetle alighting on his shoulder as more than something to be simply brushed off.

Last weekend I spotted this hunky timber rattler (Crotalus horridus) basking quietly, ten feet off a busy multi-use trail.

I rushed my picture and note taking as a crowd of mountain bikers crested a rise in front of me. I don't think I was being selfish; even if 100 passers by would relish the sight of this beautiful serpent sitting calmly in its element, I fear the 1 who would tell his sadistic cousin, who would come back with his shotgun or shovel. Still I got that special feeling that I witnessed a world that most people passing through did not.

The trip had started with a black ratsnake (Pantherophis obsoleta). I had seen it far away on the main trail (Snake or stick? Is it moving? It's moving!) and had taken off at a sprint to reach it before it could exit the trail. It saw me too soon and doubled back into a tight thicket I couldn't penetrate, mockingly shaking its tail in the leaves as it receded.

Soon I dropped off the trail, down the mountain towards the rocks. I was heading for coordinates where we had found rattlers a few years ago, and as I rounded the top of a small cliff I saw this gorgeous vision.

I know most people don't love snakes like I do, but come on, isn't this the slightest bit endearing? Three adult rattlers, who could spread out if they chose, basked together in a neat cuddly pile.

Not only are they basking, they're doing it with a perfect view of the valley below on the edge of a cliff. I'm sure they chose the site for the sun and not the view, but it still makes for a lovely scene from a human perspective.

My snake antennae perked up at this point, but even so I was surprised to see this little yearling sleeping in the warmth of the sun filtering down from the mostly overcast sky (the sun did peek out every few minutes).

The slope was all smaller rocks than I'm used to seeing timbers in, rocks that almost all shifted and slipped as I tried to step gracefully on them.

I saw another a few yards away; let's assume I missed another ten who were higher or lower on the slope or better hidden.

I finally reached the coordinates, already feeling successful, and found this beauty stretched out and enjoying the weather.

I decided to take her cue and did the same. I found a perch ten yards above her, took off my boots, and had a drink of water. After ten minutes the clouds parted and the hotter sun let her keep her temperature up with less skin exposed, and she retreated under an overhanging rock.

On the way back I detoured to visit a mountain bog (again, just out of sight off the trail).

Here's a resident green frog (Rana clamitans)...

...and the remains of spotted (maybe Jefferson's) salamander (Ambystoma maculatum or jeffersonianum) egg masses.

I heard and saw the splash of some kind of turtle clattering into the water. Note to self: I really need to come back here earlier in the spring (or with binoculars) when there's less foliage to see what kind.

2011-06-02T06:06:00.000-07:00

The garter snake and I were at an impasse. I had a grip on the back half of the snake, while he was thoroughly tangled with the grass to the point that pulling him out would have meant ripping out the entire clump of grass while trying not to rip him in half. That's putting it a little strongly, but I decided to take a quick shot of the section of snake I did have in hand, and to do the noble thing and let him go after that.

The herping gods smiled on that decision, and a second later when I flipped the piece of aluminum siding I had guessed he was headed for, there he was, strong and healthy enough to give me a strong garter snake greeting of teeth and feces (and musk, of course).

I had decided on a quick trip out to my beloved Mt. Moriah cemetery. There are still mountains of debris on top of where I usually find brown snakes: hard-to-flip nail-studded boards tangled in piles that would take a day to move, and then where would I put them?

The cemetery looked as overgrown as always...

...though it now featured this chilling bit of trash: a pink pet carrier with a mid-sized carnivore skeleton inside.

I try to take hope in that the door was open. I will assume that the critter was already dead when the carrier was dumped in the cemetery.

Now powerfully motivated to find something cheerfully alive, I cut down this path (yes, there is a path in the middle of all that Japanese knotweed)...

...to flip the garter. I quickly flipped one more, a chunkier female getting ready to shed her skin.

2011-05-28T17:47:00.001-07:00

A few weekends ago I helped out tabling at an environmental festival in Southeast PA. The guy organizing our table wanted a snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina).

I thought a little about that, thinking of little kids poking at the snapper, tugging its front claws until SNAP! I crossed my fingers and hoped for a small one, and as luck had it I found this little guy cruising a large puddle for tadpoles.

I also caught a cutie stinkpot (Sternotherus oderatus)...

and a painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) to round out the table.

The little snapper behaved quite well. It didn't musk, and didn't so much as hiss at the table-goers. It only snapped at me when I put it back in its home puddle, launching a strike back at me as I nudged it into the water.

2011-05-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

Skink Update:

The saga of Skink Vicious has concluded with a happy rehoming. Tony Croasdale named the skink due to its tenacious biting (gotta respect a 5-inch lizard that, when faced with a six-foot-tall monster, is so ready to do battle). I initially thought it was a female (Tony switched the name to "Nancy"), but as Vicious' head got redder and redder, I was convinced he was a male.

Some friends from the otherwise-skinkless neighborhood where Tony found Skink Vicious crossing 47th St. put me in touch with a nature center in Chester County at which one of the friends' mother volunteers: the Great Vally Nature Center.

Jen and I took the drive out for the rehoming, and I happily handed our guest off to Jeremy, who showed me the impressive exhibit space in the Center, where I am content that our skink will help educate thousands of nature-curious suburbanites.

2011-05-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

Was there anything selfish about writing a bog turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii) article for Grid? So far my Urban Naturalist articles for the Philadelphia sustainability magazine has covered a few herp topics - for example see this year's articles on American toads (Bufo americanus) and garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) - but they've been about common critters that didn't require any special trips or research on my part. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has been interested in having Grid about their activities (I had a lovely lunch with one of their PR staff last year), so highlighting their work preserving bog turtle habitat was a win for them, and one of the premier federally-listed species in our region is surely a valid topic for a magazine about sustainability in the Philadelphia area.

But I still feel a little guilty for having had so much fun. Scott and I would love to find a bog turtle on our own - readers of this blog might recall that my favorite finds are those that I've achieved through my own scouting and research - but they're federally listed (threatened) for a reason, they're cryptic as hell where they do occur, and they mostly live on difficult-to-access private land. I'll have fun with whatever bog turtles I can find, however I find them.

Last fall my TNC contact invited me out to see bog turtle research in action. I couldn't make it, but this spring we arranged for me to meet up with a TNC Land Steward to see bog turtle habitat and hike along as he observed the actual turtles.

I met George Gress at the site (because of the sensitivity of bog turtle habitat I can only say it's somewhere in Southeast PA, and I ran all photos by TNC to ensure I wasn't including any identifying features) and we chatted as we disinfected our waders to reduce the chance of spreading turtle diseases site-to-site (sprayed with 10% bleach solution followed by a rinse with water. Given the growing list of epidemics of introduced species - microbial and bigger - we should all do this all the time).

Soon we were slogging through the marsh and passing through fences designed to keep livestock in or out of different sections of the property. Bog turtles live in shallow marshes that tend to shift into wet forest if left alone. Once upon a time large native herbivores ( think elk, bison) probably helped keep the marshes open, and beavers helped create new marsh as their ponds filled up over decades. More recently farmers who grazed livestock in these 'wet meadows' unwittingly helped the turtles, and today TNC and other land managers utilize cattle and goats to keep the marsh open. Here are some of our four-legged partners.

Soon George spotted two boggies basking, half-burrowed into the vegetation.

One was an old female (think at least in her forties) with one foot gone and toes missing from another foot, and deep notches from earlier researchers.

(note the stump leg near the heel of my thumb)

Her companion was a male George didn't have in her records. I got to hold the turtles as George weighed, measured, and took notes on the turtles and notched the new guy, who rewarded George with a chomp on the finger (what would you do if a giant monster sawed away at your shell with a file?).

Here's that male in an uncomfortable position:

A little while after that George found another pair, leaving me thrilled to hold bog turtles again, but starting to feel a little incompetent or left-out: George 4, me 1.

"A turtle!" George claimed as we slogged fifteen feet apart in high reed canary grass. I turned quickly to my left and started jumping over to George's position. That's where I felt something funny under my left foot.

Yep, it was a bog turtle. The Nature Conservancy was gracious enough to have me out on one of their secret properties to observe a federally threatened species, and I stepped on one of them.

The turtle was fine. It was sitting on a big pile of dry grass sitting on a foot or so of mud, so in the split second it took me to notice it, I had only pushed knocked it a little sideways. Of course George than spotted ANOTHER, smaller turtle a couple feet away.

His first turtle and the little one he saw were our old friends the spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata), and while he marked the little spotty (as they get rarer, TNC is keeping an eye on them too) and took notes on all three, I got to give them a nice once-over.

Here's the bog turtle with the larger spotted:

The two spotteds together:

Selfish or not, I had a great time and I hope the article looks good when it runs next month. I appreciate TNC's hospitality and George's friendly and expert guidance. I should mention I have been a TNC member for years, and I feel even better about what my dues are supporting.

2011-05-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick skink update. First, dig the red/orange coloration on the head. The heads of male five-lined skinks (Eumeces fasciatus) flush red in the breeding season. A friend's mother connected me with a nature center where she volunteers, and I hope to ferry the little guy out there soon.

In the meantime, he's been a fun guest. We've developed a morning routine: I spray down the sides of the tank to give him something to drink (apparently captive skinks don't immediately comprehend water dishes) and every-other day I leave him some mealworms in the old peanut butter jar lid. He waits five minutes and then pops out of the shredded paper to lap up the water, snap up the mealworms, and bask for a while.

The whole experience reminds me of the value of temporarily captive critters. However opposed I am to the pet trade, I do think it's a great idea for kids and older naturalists to keep something they've found for a short period of time to observe it more closely in captivity. As long as it's a common species, you meet its short-term needs while you're hosting it, and you take care to avoid any disease transmission (bleach the hell out of everything and keep it separate from any other critters you keep) it's a great way to gain a deeper understanding of animals you usually only see in flashes and glimpses.

2011-05-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

I had almost forgotten what it was like to see a timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus). I stepped slowly and very carefully through the trees and briars to the first talus slope, hoping I could tell snake from stone and shadow, that my eyes would pick out a snake before I spooked it. If I spooked it I hoped I could hear it sliding before it got away completely.

A lot of stone and shadow into my hike I finally heard the first snake, the slow rustling slide of a heavy timber rattler making its way over the rocks. I stared towards where I thought the sound was coming from, but it took me a moment to pick the snake out, just about as it gave me a quick warning rattle.

I backed off and the snake, stretched out as though crawling right to left, paused another moment and continued picking its way rock to rock as I took some photos.

A few hundred yards away I scrambled up another talus slope, hopping from boulder to boulder. I wanted to see if anyone was hanging out around a couple rocks that are popular with the gravid females in the summer - we call them rookery sites.

See the rattler? I didn't either. She was rattling something fierce, though, and after a bit of staring I made out some black scales amid the shadows inside this little thicket.

I left her alone and spied out this other rattler basking more openly.

I was on my way to a meeting that afternoon, and with sun peaking in the sky I needed to head back. A black rattler greeted me near where I had seen the first one crawling (looked a lot like the first one, but the blotch pattern is a little different)...

... and as I made my way off that slope and neared another patch of rocks I don't think of as being quite so snakey, I saw this beauty hanging out.

Here are a few non-snakes. First, this pool lower on the hillside hosted a bunch of amphibian egg masses, I think mostly spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) and wood frog (Rana sylvatica), but maybe some Jefferson's salamander eggs (Ambystoma jeffersonianum). This was a couple weeks ago, but still several weeks behind our early amphibians.

Here's something else that lives around the rocks (moss and lichen):

Last up, this one is for Ted MacRea of Beetles in the Bush, a six-spotted tiger beetle basking on a boulder. These are usually more skittish than basking map turtles - five steps ahead any time I want a shot of that crazily bright green bug on the trail - so I took advantage of the beetle calmly taking some sun.

2011-05-04T16:59:00.000-07:00

My friend, birder, environmental educator, and friend of skinks everywhere Tony Croasdale asked me to come along with him on a visit to the Heinz National Wildlife Refuge with a busload of high school students, and I didn't hesitate to say yes.

Tony coordinates an after-school environmental education program (and a summer 'junior docent' program for which he's raising money right now) that connects kids at urban public high schools in Philadelphia with nature, right in some of our wildest places.

In past work Tony had drummed up donations of binoculars, so every kid got a pair and got to spy up their own swallows (barn and tree), ospreys, and yellow warblers. About the ospreys, we even got to see one snatch up a decent sized carp from the Impoundment at the Refuge.

I was there for turtle IDs, and we did spot some big ol' redbellies (Pseudemys rubriventris), painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) and a few of those invasive red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta).

Back near the refuge I pointed out a green frog on a log (Rana clamitans):

The kids were engaged, interested, and seemed to learn a good bit about birds, turtles, and the marsh.

I'll close with another appeal for support for that summer program. In full disclosure I'm on the board of the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center, and federal funding cuts have endangered our junior docent/junior naturalist program, where we train high school kids to be environmental leaders and guides in the Cobbs Creek section of Fairmont Park. Tony's spearheading the fundraising effort to keep the program alive, and you can help us out by donating here: http://www.indiegogo.com/Cobbs-Creek-Junior-Naturalists

2011-05-01T04:23:00.000-07:00

Every year I try to find another spotted turtle population (Clemmys guttata). I look at the maps and satellite images, do a little scouting over the winter, and then see if they're there like I expect them to be in the spring.

This year's spot was in the Pine Barrens. There are probably decent spotted turtle populations all over the Pine Barrens, but so far I haven't looked for them there - part of my overall anti-Pine-Barrens bias I suppose.

Our herping buddy Frank (a.k.a. Obi Frank Kenobi) told me once that he found a pine snake (Pituophis melanoleucus) at a spot I herped a lot when I first moved up here - 2005-2006. Frank has been herping since before I was born, so there might not be pine snakes there anymore, but I thought I might as well take a look around and get a feel for the terrain.

I couldn't hunt both pine snakes and spotted turtles at the same time. Spotted turtles are creatures of shallow water; pine snakes prowl and tunnel beneath the upland sands of the Barrens. They are also best found in different weather: spotted turtles tend to be morning people and are hard to find once it gets hot, while we, at least, tend to find pine snakes crawling around in warmer weather.

So I started off with the spotted turtle hunt. I tromped and slogged my way through the flooded forest fringing a creek and found no spotties. I did see a ton of dead Japanese stiltgrass.

I'm not sure if spotted turtles don't like the stuff - its an invasive exotic weed that tends to choke out everything else - but I think of it as the sign of a degraded landscape, and I saw no spotties there. I did see some wood frogs (Rana sylvatica)...

...as well as the season's first box turtle (Terrapene carolina) sitting pretty on an island in the marsh.

As a rule, box turtles make a trip. If you find a box turtle, the trip is not a failure and you have not wasted your time driving all that distance, burning all that gasoline, slogging and hacking all those miles. I looked the scared guy over and rubbed my hands over the warm, rough shell to trigger the release of some more endorphins (mine of course) before I put him down.

After a couple hours I headed uphill and worked back to the car on the sand.

I met a pair of fence lizards (Sceloporus undulatus) sitting in a hollow tree.

They ran out when I looked more closely. Here's the big girl up on the trunk doing her best squirrel imitation (trying to stay on the other side of the tree).

Here's the male, who actually stopped on the trunk and did some push ups that showed off his pretty blue belly and throat.

I saw no pine snakes, but check out this track under the sand. Pine snakes eat pocket gophers, and so seeing pocket gopher tracks is a nice sign.

It was over 70 degrees and the sun was shining hard when I took a quick detour into one last patch of marsh. I could see some bushes and tangled greenbriar from up on hill, and that was enough to pull me back down into the water.

And the water looked perfect. I even wrote "perfect water" in my notebook (I did not write 'perfect vegetation' as shrubs and vines - many of them with thorns - did their best to poke my eyes out and skin me), and then a couple steps later I watched a spotted turtle slide into the water.

I was elated. I did not catch the turtle (I tried, feeling around for a few minutes like a raccoon), I didn't see or catch another, but I was ecstatic to simply have found a turtle where I wanted to find a turtle.

2011-04-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

Dig the mystery skink:
My friend Tony Croasdale (birder and environmental extraordinaire) called me this afternoon. I was working from home, so when he told me he had found a skink crossing 47th St. between Warrington and Springfield, I rode out to meet him. (Actually I said, "No you did not!" and he said, "Yes I did! It's biting my hand right now!" Then I got up.)

This is a five-lined skink, distinguishable by some of the scales around the lip and ear from another skink that lives in DE, the broadhead (E. laticeps). In this case the lip (labial) scales are ambiguous (I count 5 labials, not the 4 that a five-line should have) but the ear scales (post-labials) look five-line.

Now I know there are snakes in this neighborhood (brown snakes - Storeria dekayi), and I wouldn't be surprised to find a redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus), but a skink?

Rumor has it that there might still be five-lined skinks (Eumeces fasciatus) in Philadelphia, but only at the woolier fringes, S. Philly around the bottom of FDR Park, for example. Moreover, unlike the secretive brown snakes and redback salamanders, these skinks are public critters. We would see them hanging around gardens and old walls, just like I've seen them skittering around in South Jersey and upstate PA. They're not as obvious as anoles, but still I would have seen them, or one of my friends who live right near that corner would have told me about them (to be sure, I've been asking them - no one so far, including gardeners with boys, reports skinks).

Thus I am pretty sure this girl [note - since I wrote this I have changed my mind re the sex of the skink. As its head has gotten redder and redder, it is clearly a male, whose heads get red during the breeding season.] is a hitchhiker. Tony found her - saved her from an oncoming school bus, actually - right near a church that's undergoing a renovation, with lots of contractors from NJ and DE trucking in loads of equipment and materials. This is just the kind of lizard to have been chilling in a heap of scaffolding in some rural or suburban contractor's yard, only to wake up in the city.

Tony and I tried to talk to the guys working on the church but couldn't nail down a specific likely home. Since we don't know where she came from, I'm loathe to just let her go - relocated adult herps generally don't relocate well - and am putting out feelers for anyone who would like her as an educational/display animal. I would rather not keep her, so next up would be anyone looking for a lizard to keep (to be clear, this would not be a sale - that would illegal. I'm just looking for a good home for her). These apparently do well in captivity as long as you don't handle them. Lizards are a little more high maintenance than the snakes I keep (and I already have enough/too many snakes), so I'd rather not hold onto her for too long.

2011-04-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick report on a quick trip in cloudy weather a couple weeks ago, when I had been thinking of just staying in the apartment and doing boring things, but then got the motivation up to check out a small stream near a marsh we like to herp.

Streamside/streambed herping used to be my bread and butter - it's easy and nearly instantaneously-gratifying. Almost any stream, with the exception of REALLY polluted streams that you probably wouldn't want to splash on you anyhow, host at least one species of salamander (up here it's two-lines: Eurycea bislineata). As the streams get cleaner and you get more protected land around them you can add a few more salamanders, a few frog species, maybe a couple snake species, etc. This is probably the most fun in the Southern Appalachians, where they have more salamander species than they know what to do with, though the fun changes when you're holding a dusky salamander (Desmognathus species) with a vague pattern and you can't figure out which of the four or five local candidates it could be.

That's not a problem in the Delaware Valley. We've got maybe four likely salamanders: the two-lines, northern duskies (D. fuscus), long-tailed salamanders (E. longicauda), and red salamanders (Pseudotriton ruber), which eat all the other ones. Get another hour and a half into the mountains and you can add mountain duskies plus the real beast of our rocky streams, the spring salamander (Gyrinophilus porphyriticus - note the genus name, which means 'tadpole-loving,' kind of like how I 'love' ice cream.). I often find frogs too, namely pickerel frogs (Rana palustris) and green frogs (Rana clamitans), the occasional garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) or nothern watersnake (Nerodia sipedon), and, if I'm really lucky (and I haven't been this lucky yet in PA) a queen snake (Regina septemvittata). Basically all you do is walk up a length of stream bank and look under the rocks and logs. I have the best luck with objects right at the edge, where a rock might be hitting the water on only one side. This luck might be more a question of how hard it is to catch critters uncovered in the full flow of the water, where the kicked-up silt makes it hard to see anything and they can swim away more easily, than of these types of rocks making better homes for critters. Either way, flip what you can, and don't be too hard on yourself if they swim away before you can get your hands on them; usually if you see one of a given salamander, you'll see more.

Thus I wasn't too hard on myself for not catching the two-lines I saw in this stream.

Someone else had been here hunting.

I made sure to check some boards on the way down.

I didn't expect a whole lot and thus was not disappointed, but I did think it was neat to see a small mammal working on making this board into a home.

That's cute in its own right, but it also promises to make for nice milk snake (Lampropeltis triangulum) bait.

Last up, here's a really nice-looking red-back salamander I found under a brick sitting on top of a stone wall. All kinds of objects cry out 'flip me,' and even if most of them are liars, every now and then they tell the truth.

Here was my third try at a photo. I decided not to detain the salamander any more and let it go.

2011-04-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Late last fall a friend and herpetologist who works at a local park called me up with a black ratsnake (Pantherophis obsoleta) babysitting offer. Someone in the suburbs where, frankly, I wouldn't expect any ratsnakes to be hanging on, had brought in a baby black ratsnake they had found in their house.

It was too late in the year to release it somewhere new. She would likely freeze before it found another good place to hibernate. My friend said I could take her for the winter, and in the spring we could either release her or I could hold onto her if I felt like it.

Here she is (I'm pretty sure it's a 'she'):

I don't know if you think this is cute (probably not), but this is just about the most adorable face I've seen. I know that she's terrified of me, all the time, but I think it's precious how she rears back, hisses, and then strikes with furious gusto every time I take the top off her temporary home to feed her, check her water, or just clean up after her.

So, through the winter I could just focus on making sure she was eating and otherwise healthy and (presumably) content, but now it's spring again, and probably just a few weeks away from perfect weather for releasing a baby ratsnake.

Now, cue the part where the little kid cries "Mom, can I keeeep her?" Of course the fun part of being a grown up is that I don't need anyone's permission. Okay, I suppose Jen has a veto on this, but she probably wouldn't put her foot down if I put mine down - what's another snake when you have five already? Anyhow I'm happy to unload the Florida scarlet snake (Cemophora coccinea) if anyone wants it (feel free to drop me a note if you do), and Big Yellow, the yellow ratsnake I adopted in Baltimore in 2004 when she was already full grown, is looking a little old these days. I am committed to taking good care of her, but by the time this baby black ratsnake is full grown, I bet Big Yellow might not be around anymore (...this is a morbid train of thought I will nip in the bud right now.). All that said, space and time are real concerns, and it is only with enormous willpower and years of practice that I have mastered the covetous, acquisition impulse I feel whenever I see a really cool snake.

Of course keeping a wild snake is not only a question of space and available time, I should also consider the interests of the snake and the broader environment.

I'll actually start with the law. Black ratsnakes are not particularly protected in PA; they fall on the 'all the others' sort of list of PA herps, so that they have a bag limit and possession limit of one. Since I have no other black ratsnakes (FYI, all my other snakes are non-native, and all are rescues except for the old FL scarlet snake) and I did not purchase the snake (selling/buying most PA herps is illegal), I should be in the clear keeping her. Technically I might get in trouble for releasing her, but I doubt anyone would crack down on me for that. The concern is of introducing diseases from captive populations to wild populations. I have been extra careful to keep her in a thoroughly cleaned (= lots of bleach) container with an equally scrubbed/cleaned water dish, and to keep her well apart from the rest of the critters, using different tools, washing my hands before handling her, etc., so I am pretty confident she hasn't caught anything from her neighbors. (If anyone still thinks it is too risky to release her, maybe that will be the excuse I need to keep her :-) )

The release option would mean going somewhere nearby with a healthy population of ratsnakes - my friend has a spot in mind in Chester County - and letting the little tyke go. This would mean removing the snake permanently from the suburban population where she originated. One could argue that the population is fragile and could use the extra snake; I would argue the population is doomed, and either way a baby with a very slim chance of survival doesn't make a big difference (a four-foot, breeding female would be a different matter).

That leads nicely to the next question - the interests of the snake. It's worth starting off this side of the discussion by pointing out that most adult snakes (this seems to hold for box turtles too, and probably lots of other land critters) released far from home generally do not survive. We tend to think of reptiles as stupid creatures reacting to their landscape on a moment-to-moment basis, but they probably have a much more refined sense of place and landscape than we usually give them credit for. I'll wager an adult ratsnake knows every greenbriar thicket, stumphole, and hollow tree in its territory, a territory that could cover a few square kilometers. When you release a snake that has lived its whole life in a specific place in another place, it starts looking for home. It might set off over hill and dale looking for that home, and it might get run over by a car or picked off by a hawk while it's wandering. It might spend too little time hunting and eating while it is searching, and winter might find it too thin to make it to spring. It would be kind of like dropping me in downtown Moscow. I don't know the language, I don't know anyone I could crash with, I don't know which are the sketchy neighborhoods I should avoid.

The result is that relocating adult snakes tends to go badly. There are exceptions, but the point is that relocating a snake more than a mile or two from where you've found it generally is the same as killing it. It just takes longer. This does not hold as true for baby snakes. They might face slimmer odds for a variety of other reasons, but they tend to be better able to settle down in a new place, perhaps because it is natural for baby snakes to wander around until they find a nice spot anyhow.

Of course baby snakes generally don't survive in the wild. Let's assume that an adult female ratsnake breeds for five seasons before she gets picked off by a hawk or run over by a car, and if we assume she averages 6 hatching eggs per year (both round estimates for the sake of argument: she might breed one year or fifteen before her demise; they generally lay bigger clutches than that, but I'll assume some years they get eaten by skunks). In a stable population an average of only two of any reproducing female's offspring will make it to maturity. Two divided by thirty gives us pretty crappy odds. I might be tempted into thinking I'm giving the snake a life of glorious freedom, wandering forests and thickets, raiding nests and basking on old tree branches, but the options are more realistically either a long and well-fed life in a boring box versus a few months of nervous freedom ended by the snip of a crow's beak.

Like I said, I've got a couple weeks to make the decision, so let me know what you think.

2011-04-07T19:34:00.000-07:00

It was not I, but my cousin Tim who found the year's first brown snake (Storeria dekayi). This is my cousin Tim who is working hard to get over his fear of snakes, who manages to stand closer to my extremely docile caged rat snakes (Pantherophis obsoleta subspecies) but still hasn't worked up the courage to touch one yet; it was he who found the brown snake.

We were hanging out last weekend, a weekend when other obligations had prevented me from taking the proper herping trip(s) the weather demanded, and I decided to go for a quick walk with him in the Woodlands Cemetery near our respective apartments in West Philly.

This is a beautiful time in our neighborhood, with flowers popping out everywhere, especially now on the magnolias and ornamental cherries. (eat it up flower lovers; these are the only ones you're likely to see all year).

Once in the cemetery I steered our course towards where I've seen the most snakes, and after I had unsuccessfully looked under a few logs and boards, Tim kicked at a chunk of a decaying stump to reveal a pleasant female brown snake.

Here she is - extremely calm, didn't even poop on me.

I found my own critter a few minutes later under a rotting board:

That is an enormously gravid redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus), who is soon to lay a bunch of eggs and likely guard them under the board until they hatch out. The genus Plethodon is interesting in that the babies hatch out terrestrial, skipping the aquatic larval stage of most other salamanders and enabling them to live away from water.

2011-03-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

With all due respect to the birders, who experience their quarry in one, maybe two senses, nothing wipes away the winter duldrums like holding a spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata) in my hand. I relish the solid wieght of a healthy turtle, I love the hard shell - polished smooth in the old-timers, rough for the youngsters - and, I always take time to feel (fondle?) the softer, scaley feet tipped with pointy but not quite sharp claws. I might be going off the naturalist deep end here, but I feel some kind of connection, hand to foot, analogue-to-analogue, even at hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary distance.

Of course while I think of it as a meaning-laden handshake from the world's cutest creature, the turtle thinks of it as a panicked attempt to get the hell away from this giant monster and back in the water and weeds where it can safely get back to whatever I so rudely interrupted.

What I interrupted for these three was probably pretty heated, at least in spotted turtle terms. The three turtles were arranged in an equilateral triangle, all facing the same direction in a watery space amid sedges and cattails, the female in the lead, the two males close behind her. Imagine a party, where an attractive young woman is trying to get in line for the keg while two guys both put the moves on her, maybe even trying to shove each other out of the way. Suddenly a giant hand reaches through the window and grabs all three a few stories up into the air.

Here's one more shot of the female that shows the landscape a bit better in the background.

Here's another female I found elsewhere (near where I had earlier seen a spottie slide into the water and slip out of reach beneath a submerged lip of tree roots. I groped after it for a few dozen seconds of 38-degree pain but came up empty handed), smoother shell indicating her seniority, and bearing the scars of a long-past encounter of something with teeth on her carapace...

and plastron.

Spotted turtles aren't the only thing swimming around the marsh wookin pa nub. I saw a couple red-spotted newts (Nopthalmus viridiscens) perusing the weedy shallows, walking/swimming forward a few body lengths and then weaving down among the matted dead grasses and leaves at the bottom before popping up again.

Here's a male, in the newt-equivalent of breeding plumage (really hard to portray this in the air - I need to bring along a transparent container to get a good shot). Check out the strongly keeled tail and, in the second photo the swollen vent (you can just see it behind the rear leg on the left).

I think I heard one or two wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) chuckling away, shouted down by the peepers. The woodies' work was apparent in deeper marsh pools - blobby egg masses soon to hatch out into tadpoles.

As tired as I get of the painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) it would be unrepresentative to leave them out of the trip account. I walked around a pond set in the marsh and heard dozens go skitter-splash as they got back to the safety of the water, though some stopped and tried to hide in the shallows where I could still get to them.

2011-03-17T05:30:00.001-07:00

The traditional order of the spring is as follows: tiger salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum - maybe in the winter, but we'll count 'em), then spotted salamanders (Ambystoma tigrinum) together with wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) and spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer). Then the reptiles start to show up. Spotted (Clemmys guttata) and some other turtles like painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) start basking even in very cold weather, and then we start seeing the garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis), followed by basically everything else in a rush from mid April through May.

I haven't found any spotted turtles quite yet, and on a spotted turtle trip to our favorite marsh, this baby water snake (Nerodia sipedon) skipped the usual order, though I think the springhouse spillway we found it in (entwined with watercress roots) may have been where it spent the winter.

Here's another of the springhouse spillway regulars, a pickerel frog (Rana palustris).
Even a strike-out trip (in spotted turtle terms) is still better than almost anything else I could be doing, and even a brown, still-dead-vegetation marsh is a beautiful place to spend an afternoon.

I'll wind up with a video that I took as an excuse to record the sound of a spring peeper chorus. I didn't see any, but they were all around me.

2011-03-11T16:49:00.000-08:00

Hypothermia and herping don't usually come to mind together, but I've been freezing my butt off this winter in pursuit of critters, and I suppose spring is no reason to stop.

Imagine the release scene at the end of a documentary where a wounded wild animal has been rehabilitated - maybe a puma that has been hit by a car has finally had its casts and silly neck-cone taken off. It is caged at the edge of a field, desperate to get on the other side of the bars. Suddenly the park ranger yanks up the gate and the cat flies out of the cage, thrilled and probably not quite believing it is actually free. That's how Mid-Atlantic herpers feel right about now. A few weeks ago it was cold and snowy (but we KNEW, any day now it could break...) and then the temperatures got up above freezing and it started to rain.

I actually missed the first couple rains. Scott and I did drive around the Coastal Plain for one night waiting for a storm that only hit when we were on our way back home at midnight and I was passed out in the passenger seat. He scored the next week with an Ambystoma trifecta (opacum - marbled, maculatum - spotted, and tigrinum - tiger), but with another storm bearing down on us last week, we made sure our night was clear and headed for the PA countryside.

Another herper I knew sent us the details for an amphibian crossing guard volunteer opportunity, so we signed up to walk around with a clip board in the frigid rain (temps dropped from 38 to 35 while we were out) counting salamanders as we helped them across the road.

The smaller the herp, the harder it is to pick up off wet tar-mac. Four toed salamanders (Hemidactylium scutatum) seemed to wriggle between the pebbles set in the asphalt. I start with their best side - their enamel white bellies speckled like a mini dalmatian.

On top they're a basic-looking salamander, though in daylight they do take on a nice metallic sheen that doesn't show up here. We saw two of them, though one could question how many we passed without even seeing them. After they mate, the females lay eggs next to the water under moss, and then sit with them until they hatch and the larvae drop into the water.

We saw a few spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer) sitting on the road. I couldn't move my fingers very quickly to grab them, but then with temps in the mid-30s, these guys weren't moving very quickly either and were very easy to pick up.

Spotted salamanders were a lot easier to see. We saved eight on the way to the crossing guard meet-up point (and saw four or five that hadn't made it across), and once there got our total up to about 60, dominated by females (about three fifths - previous nights were dominated by males, who generally get to the pools first, not unlike male humans who arrive at the bar and start drinking before the women).

Look how fat she is - the big girl is schlepping around a hundred or so eggs and probably can't wait to get them all out.

Here is a male - note how much thinner he is.

Males arrive with a swollen vent and ready to drop their load of spermataphores (little packets of sperm that the females then pick up with their own vents, fertilizing their eggs internally before they lay them) leaving Scott and me to infer the amphibian equivalent of (well, think about it).

The ponds and marshes around the roads we patrolled will now be full of jelly-like globs of salamander eggs, and these adults might already have started the trip back home - maybe just a few dozen meters, but up to 800 meters in some cases, quite a hike for an eight-inch salamanders.

It's hard to say when exactly we lost feeling in our extremities, but by the end of the night our hands were moving in slow motion and our facial muscles froze up too. Thus it is conceivable that below you see me with some kind of pained rictus, but I'm pretty sure I was just gleefully happy with the first proper herping night of the season.

2011-03-09T05:12:00.000-08:00

I swam in the ocean and I canoed in a couple rivers on last July's Florida vacation (see the first post here), and I have to say I favor the inland waters of the Sunshine State, or at least its panhandle.

Springs pop out of the limestone that underlies much of the panhandle, producing gorgeously clear pools flowing out into gentle (but chilly) creeks that are a pleasure to canoe or kayak. I took a couple absolutely sublime trips - one by kayak on my own, another in a canoe with my brother-in-law Fernando, who is entitled to call in the debt I owe him for constantly stopping the canoe as I jumped in the water to pursue turtle after turtle.

I am not going to organize this post by trip; rather I'll start with the scenery and then discuss some of the turtle species I saw.

Here's a murkier creek, one I was working on foot (in other words tripping and slogging my way along) until the deep mud, snags, and the nagging fear that an alligator was going to rip my arm off called it quits for me. There are some wary turtles in the distance in this shot. In the foreground is a large branch I sort of flopped over into the mud again.

I'll start with the ugly. I mean no offense to the cutely homely mud turtle (Kinosternon subrubrum) but there is a little bit of a let down when you charge into the mud and water and then realize you've caught something you can find at home:

The first turtle I came up with on the canoe trip with Fernando was almost as unexciting - a yellow-bellied slider (Trachemys scripta scripta), the less attractive cousin of the red-eared sliders (T. s. elegans) that are colonizing the Delaware Valley from their native range in the middle part of the country. Yellow bellies live all over the Southeast, and you can find them just about anywhere there is water.

Still, it was an exciting proof of concept: that I could see turtles dive into the water, and then catch them by diving in after them with my mask and snorkel.

There are three species of cooter that I probably saw on this trip (all related to our local cooter, a.k.a. the redbelly turtle - Pseudemys rubriventris). The most common, based on the one I caught and the characteristics of the river I caught it in, is the river cooter (Pseudemys concinna). They have a distinctive C-shaped mark on one of the scutes towards the front of the carapace along with other distinctive markings that I was unable to make out in the far-off, wary turtles that jumped in elsewhere. Thus I might also have seen some Florida cooters (P. floridana) and Florida Redbellies (P. nelsoni).

One of those turtles in the distance (my camera does great underwater, but not so great on zooming in for long distance) is a beefy-looking softshell (Apalone sp.) that I failed to catch. Part of the problem is that I lost my flashlight in the river early on the trip, and with the cloudiness of the water couldn't see much towards the bottom of the deeper sections.

Even when I didn't get my hands on the turtles, I did enjoy the other river dwellers I got to see:

Now here is the catch of the trip, a Barbour's map turtle (Graptemys barbouri). The males and females look quite different, with the males staying small and eating bugs and small crustaceans, while the much larger females grow bulldog-massive heads for crushing mollusks and crustaceans. I only found one male - testament to my poor turtling skills on an unfamiliar river, but I was still pleased as punch. Here is how it looked underwater.

Here's the little guy for one out-of-the-water shot before being released.

2011-03-06T05:03:00.000-08:00

I usually save vacation herping posts for the depths of winter, when the Delaware Valley will yield nothing to the hard-up herper, but somehow it's already spring amphibian migration time, and I still haven't posted the results of last July's family vacation (with my wife Jen's family) to the Florida panhandle.

The herpers reading this should be smiling and nodding knowingly - for the rest of the readers, the Florida panhandle, particularly the area around the Apalachicola River, may just be the best place to go herping in the entire country. Some will object and hold up southern Arizona or the Everglades, but the panhandle's mix of peninsular and Southeastern species puts it waaay up there.

As a guy who likes jumping into the water after turtles, though, I'll take the panhandle. The Everglades is a land of murky, shallow water, and Arizona's awesome rattlesnake diversity is countered by its dry climate and sadly limited turtle roster, which counts zero species of my favorites, the map turtles (Graptemys sp.).

Never mind that turtle build-up. I'm breaking the trip into two shorter posts, and this first one is about the terrestrial herping I did.

I am miffed to report that I had very recently messed up my ankle when we headed down to the Gulf Coast, so I was pretty much stuck road cruising from a car - my least favorite herping technique (though given the mid-summer timing of the trip, maybe the only productive one).

On the other hand, with most of my hopes pinned on aquatic herping, I had low hopes on land.

Early on, Jen and I took our niece Mariana with us to try out some roads that seemed to have some potential. I was wrong, and about all we found were southern toads (Bufo terrestris).

They were cute, but they weren't as cute as the snake I most wanted to find (in retrospect I have down-graded snakes I most wanted to find but did not find to a slightly lower status), the dusky pygmy rattlesnake (Sistrurus miliarius barbouri). To be fair, we have our own pygmies up in Pennsylvania, the rare and elusive massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus - note the genus is different than our timbers, of the much more speciose Crotalus; the Sistrurus are externally distinguished by larger scales on the tops of their heads) that linger in a few patches of wetland in western PA. The dusky pygmies are neither rare nor elusive, and on my first early morning road cruise I came up on this little cutie crossing a dirt road.

(The nickel in the shot is a herp photography standard, to show the size of something small with a coin for comparison - some folks have gotten baby snakes of smaller species to coil up on dimes for a neat effect) I am too poor or impatient a photographer to portray this snake's beautifully intricate and rich pattern of russet spots and black blotches outlined with just the narrowest white edging; 'dusky' is an unfair name for these guys.

Otherwise, morning herping (mixed in with scouting out spots to hop in the water) turned up a few box turtles (Terrapene carolina major). These were crossing the road in the humid, newly-sunny mornings, just like box turtles do up here. The Gulf Coast box turtles, with the apt subspecies handle, make up for their homely pattern with bulk - these guys looked freakishly large to my eyes.

I only did one other night road cruising trip aside from the toad trip turned up some fun little critters (and more toads):

Here is a glass lizard (Ophisaurus ventralis), one of four species of Ophisaurus in the panhandle, which gave me fits comparing my photos to the descriptions, in particular because I failed to photograph the top of the lizard, where the presence or lack of a mid-dorsal stripe would have made the ID much easier.

The only other live reptile (saw plenty of road jerky) I saw on land was this pretty little scarlet snake (Cemophora coccinae). These guys are cooler than most herpers give them credit for. Everyone appreciates how pretty they are, but their diet and teeth set them apart. They specialize on reptile eggs - hence the pointy nose adapted to digging - and feature oddly blade-like teeth that help them cut through the leathery egg shells. Once they've got the egg open, they stick their heads in to drink out the contents.

Slicing teeth are rare in snakes, which generally swallow prey whole, and scarlets share them with a few other reptile egg specialists around the world, including the Asian kukri snakes (Oligodon sp.), named for the curved knife carried by Gurkhas.

2011-02-18T16:35:00.000-08:00

Hold onto your long johns! It's time for the February House of HERPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If those exclamation points seem a little labored, if it appears that I am using happy punctuation a little too heavily, well, you've seen right through my lame attempt to dance around, to obfuscate, certainly avoid, and maybe even to circumvent the unavoidable, monolithic, painful (like icicles boring under my toenails) theme of this HOH: the frigid cruelty of the meanest month of the year, February.

I have read that the coldest time of the year tends to be the last couple weeks of January and the first couple weeks of February. Remember that we are past the winter solstice, people. The days are already getting longer, but the days are also getting colder? Does that sound fair to you?

February brings us to the ends of our respective ropes; we've put up with winter for so long, we've been stuck with warm-blooded wildlife (sorry bird and mammal people) when all we really want is something slimy or scaly to lift our spirits, and all the cool critters are sensibly slumbering under something or other (ground, water, mud).

March will tease us, to be sure, but somewhere in there it will rain, and rain will bring the big amphibian breeding explosions. Sometime in March the right series of sunny days will draw the hardier turtles out to start basking, even some snakes to dry the mud on their scales in the light of spring. February, though, is solid winter, and that icy boot on our collective neck isn't melting quite yet.

Many of us find refuge in our archives - databases of catch records and folders full of saved photos from warmer days. If we stick our fingers in our ears to block out the howling of the wind, we can almost make ourselves believe...

Mike, of One Herper, stuck up in Connecticut, finds relief with his records of what just might be the most charismatic turtle species on Earth (all you wood turtle fans can suck it), the spotted turtle (have I mentioned that on this very day, the 18th of February, I struck out on a pathetically long-shot spotted turtle trip?).

Rebecca In the Woods, clearly and unfairly prevented by ornery Old Man Winter from seeing wild terrapins out in the tidal marshes, takes out her frustrations by teasing hungry captive terrapins with bits of shrimp and capturing it all on video (don't worry; they get fed in the end).

Should I move South? Old Man Winter must be a Yankee, since Jill over at Count Your Chickens posts some lovely marbled salamanders, so much easier to flip without a blanket of snow in the way.

Of course the ultimate escape from winter is to forever avoid it, to set up at the equator, or maybe just flip flop hemispheres, forever following the spring and summer. Stewart over at Stewed Thoughts has me contemplating November-February residence/refuge in Australia, a bizarre parallel herping universe where God's inordinate fondness for beetles is replaced by a whimsical fetish for skinks (really, how many skinks do they need when they've already got pythons and goannas?), geckos, and lethally-venomous snakes. In case you think birders have a lock on obsessive life-listing, dig Stewart's last-ditch, desperate attempt to log 300 reptile species (Alive! Neither road pizza nor road jerky count.) by the end of 2010.

Ted of Beetles in the Bush opted to escape to Brazil, where he found a Mediterranean house gecko, a species that has hitchhiked with humans around the globe, or rather to the warmer parts of the globe that are worth inhabiting. No geckos here in the Delaware Valley...

But whatever my wiser herper instincts tell me, I'm staying right here on the ice planet Hoth... I mean always-sunny Philadelphia, where I'll scratch and claw my way to a herp, even if it means I have to strap on snow shoes to get to them.

So stay warm for just a few more weeks, keep busy laying your board lines and scouting all your spots for after the thaw, and just make believe that a warmer, herpier time is coming.

(this image of and from my herping buddy Eitan Grunwald. Don't make fun of him. We've all been there)

2011-02-13T18:44:00.000-08:00

Not much of a post - just a brief scouting report. The streambed/side salamanders have been pulling me away from the real reason the herping gods gave us four months of miserable, cold, nearly-lifeless weather: scouting.

On Sunday I decided to check out what I hope is my new spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata) spot for 2011. It was a slightly embarrassing revelation: that one of my oldest herping spots in the Delaware Valley, where I have focused on upland habitats over the years (it was here I fell in love with black rat snakes - Pantherophis obsoleta, found my first Delaware Valley racer - Coluber constrictor, my first worm snakes - Carphophia amoenus), features an absolutely enormous stretch of what looked on the satellite images like flooded forest.

Sure enough, after leaving one of the trails and hacking my way through the underbrush and greenbriar for fifteen minutes, I found myself in a stretch of half-frozen marsh with trees here and there and that went on forever.

It isn't quite the same as finding a real, live critter, but I could imagine them starting to stir beneath the ice all around me as I pictured the landscape another twenty degrees warmer and with strong sunlight.

2011-02-11T08:16:00.000-08:00

I can't say I planned to combine herping and snowshoeing; it just worked out that way. The landowner whose property I had shown up to search for red salamanders (Pseudotriton ruber) took a look at my boots and, in his friendly, gentle way (in no way letting on that I, as I quickly realized, was stupid to even consider covering that much ground in that much snow without them), offered me the use of his snow shoes and a walking pole (I insisted on carrying my potato rake in the other hand).

Snow shoeing, as I quickly discovered, is hard work, even if it beats sinking up to my thighs in crusty snow with each step. After checking out a well-maintained spring house next to the road and seeing only a mystery frog and some tadpoles, I set off for the far side of the property, towards the base of a forested hill where the map read "Old Spring House."

Even if the reptiles are all wisely sleeping through the winter beneath the ground or water, amphibians will often persist where the water stays liquid: in streams and in seeps and springs carrying the constant above-freezing temperature (50s or so) of the earth to the surface.

Once upon a time, before refrigerators, people took advantage of the constantly-cool spring water to keep perishables from going bad, building spring houses to trap in the cool temps.

Today the remaining spring houses can harbor stream-side salamanders such as two-lines (Eurycea bislineata), long-tails (Eurycea longicauda), and red salamanders (Pseudotriton ruber). Unfortunately this spring house had seen better days. The roof had fallen in, and the interior filled with snow.

I turned around (a very deliberate action in snow shoes) and tromped back across the fields towards the marsh.

Back at the marshier parts of the property, I took advantage of a frozen creek, much as the other mammals in the area have done.

I kept an eye open for springs in the marsh. In warmer weathers these are spots that, if you spot them ahead of time, look deceptively solid, with mud sort of pushed up into the clear water that blankets the other spaces between the shrubs and sedges. If you don't spot them ahead of time, all you know is that you are in up to your crotch when a second ago your waders had at least a couple feet of clearance. I poked around in such a spring - now clearly identifiable as an open patch in the marsh ice - but found nothing. (note to self, I REALLY need to get a proper dip net)

Back to the car I tromped, but on the way back I decided to check out that first spring house one more time. Like a lot of nicer spring houses, this one featured thick growth of watercress along the spillway - quite bright and yummy in warmer times, but now wilted and spotted. I picked up a clump of watercress and noticed one of those tadpoles wriggling away, but this time I got a close enough look to say that it wasn't a baby frog or toad.

I picked up another clump, and then another, and soon I had a couple of the larvae to examine more closely (these are about two to three inches long):

Aha! These aren't run-of-the-mill two-lines, or even the slightly sexier longtails; these are the sturdier offspring of true amphibian eye candy, the red salamander. Here's a shot of an adult from another location a couple years ago.

2011-01-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

Another weekend, another herping expedition. January 29th? The coldest time of the year? 25 degrees? Of course!

I thought I might try a spring house in the Wissahickon Valley, Philadelphia, PA, next to which I had turned up a long-tailed salamander (Eurycea longicauda)a couple years ago. Here is a long-tail from elsewhere, in Berks County, PA, a blurry shot of a really pretty one (which is worse, a nice shot of a mediocre specimen, or a bad shot of a real looker? Probably the latter for demonstrating the missed opportunity):

I hiked up to the point on the trail where I had to cut off for the spring house (thinking up to that point 'this is not that bad') and then waded into the snow.

Of course the spring house was locked (couldn't get past the Master Lock on the bolt) so I didn't have a shot at any adults, but I did dip out some water from the pool just below the spring house, full of watercress in the thawed times, and came up with some larval salamanders. Here are five of them.

Of course all turned out to be baby two-lines (Eurycea bislineata). Note the two rows of light spots down the backs of the little critters; long-tails would be generally mottled without those spots.

2011-01-23T16:50:00.000-08:00

In retrospect I've been a big wimp lately. Like most of the herpers in the northern three quarters of the United States I've been crying in my beer (literally - Scott and I got together for a mid-winter herper's consolatory drinking session last week) through these long nights and frigid days.

It took a Field Herp Forum post by Kyle "Balls of Thermite" Louks to call me on it and get me out in the snow to herp. Kyle pointed out that as long as there is water flowing out of the ground, or seeping out of the ground at the heads of little streams back in the woods (a.k.a. seeps), there are amphibians to be found.

Seeps are interesting places even in warmer times when we have more options. Some attractive species, such as red salamanders (Pseudotriton ruber), seem to be seep specialists; they're found further down little streams and in soggy spots on the Coastal Plain (say in the Pine Barrens) as well, but you can most reliably find them in those wet spots back in the woods where the streams issue from the hills. Seeps are sort of gateways to a subterranean world that I only realized was there about a year ago when I read accounts of how long-tailed salamanders (Eurycea longicauda) breed back in the cracks in the ground, deeper into the springs. (Interestingly, though we can usually go no further than the ground, our predecessors in the days before refrigeration built convenient gateways for us in the form of spring houses, little buildings taking advantage of the consistently cold spring water. No one has used these to keep the cheese from going bad for a long time, but they can make for interesting herping.)

Having been thoroughly called out by Kyle, it was time for me to find some wet water (frozen water abounds right now) and start looking for salamanders. I thought of some streams up in the Wissahickon Valley where I find long-tails, as well as some streams in the suburbs where I could flip reds, but I wanted to stay close to home, and I didn't want to be too pissed off at the time it took to get somewhere if I struck out. So, I tried out a small stream in Fairmount Park an easy bike ride from my apartment.

The thermometer read about 25 degrees when I headed out, which still strikes me as utterly absurd (it was even more so at the time with the stiff crosswind), but I rode on into the park, more hungry for a find than I was numb.

I considered more thoroughly scouting the stream once I got to it, but it was too cold to play around. Look at my poor bike in the snow!

In warm weather you might get wet flipping rocks in a stream bed, but it's no bid deal. So what if your socks are a little damp for the hike home? This time, though, I stepped much more carefully around the water and hugged the banks. I very much did not want to take my gloves off, but I decided that was better than riding home with wet gloves icing up around my fingers.

I picked up one rock to reveal the all-too-common and all-too-frustrating sight of silt stirred up, blocking anything that might have been hiding under there. I waited for the water to clear up, but there was nothing but gravel.

My eyes fell on a couple flat rocks presumably warmed by the sun, frankly where I would be if I were a salamander in that stream.

...and sure enough, the first one I tried revealed this little two-lined salamander (Eurycea bislineata):

(obligatory herp-and-snow-in-the-same-frame shot)

Two-lines are hardy little salamanders, hanging on in degraded streams where few other amphibians remain. I remember some macroinvertebrate sampling I did in Baltimore where we turned up two-lines, and studies I've been reading, looking at how amphibian diversity declines as impermeability (pavement) increases, often show two-lines as the last survivors where the reds and duskies (Desmognathus species) can't hack it anymore.

I let the cold-groggy and bewildered salamander go back by its rock and headed home. It was cold.

2011-01-02T17:51:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2011 and the first herp of the year (you know what it is), a red back salamander (Plethodon cinereus)!

I found it under a heavy, flat rock off the multi-use trail along Cobbs Creek. I was trying out some new bike shoes, on the paved trail above, and I could not resist the amphibian attraction.

It's such a simple gratification: I lift one rock... nothing. I lift another rock... nothing. Oh! Look at that big flat rock... salamander! I'm a winner!

The woods were absolutely miserable. As if everything wasn't soggy enough with snow melt, a mix of sleet and rain made sure everything above the ground was as wet as the mud.

Here's a shot of scenic Cobbs Creek, the grape vine in the foreground pulled taut by a mix of sticks and trash pushed downstream by the flow.
Here's to the next post (aside from review posts) having something besides a red back (not that there's anything wrong with them).

Have a happy and herp-ful 2011!

2010-12-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

The cold wind blows and it's been too long since I've found anything besides a red-back salamander (Plethodon cinereus).

We've got two days to the shortest day of the year, before the sun mounts its comeback. I could do an end-of-the-year roundup, but the calendar year ain't quite over yet - I could flip some interesting amphibians in Atlanta this Christmas, and we might luck out with a nice salamander-rich rain after I get back, so I'm dredging up a report from beyond my usual stomping grounds this summer.

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with my love of aquatic turtling - diving into the water with my mask and snorkel and looking for them in their terrain. This is not an original technique. It might be less popular than road cruising or flipping AC (artificial cover), but then herpers tend to be a lazy bunch (that's right, brothers, I'm calling you lazy (there are few sister herpers, and my sense is that they might work a little harder than the boys.)), but you'll see it pop up now and then on Field Herp Forum and in scholarly papers that report collecting aquatic turtles by snorkeling or wading.

I had spoken with a herpetologist from Central PA who catches map turtles in a river towards the middle of the state, and after letting one summer drift by without making it out there, I resolved to make the drive in 2010.

It was early September when I got there, a little too early in the morning still for jumping in, with mist on the water and temps in the low 70s. I saw a couple turtles basking on a rock in a patch of sun, and one more swimming around at a fishing/boating access parking lot.

(here are some of the local turkeys)

On my way up a rise in the road I noticed a blue pickup truck in my lane. I slowed down, and the truck pulled back into the correct lane but paused. Maybe it was too early for my brain to put it all together right away, but my next thought was, 'Oooh! Is that a rattlesnake? Oh, it's an enormous copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix)!'

(a few beats go by)

"Oh my God it's DEAD! The truck..." I jumped out, and looked at the snake, back at the truck (now a few yards behind me, so I couldn't quite see in the cab), back at the snake. The truck drove away.

I still wonder what I would have said if the DB in the truck had lowered the window or if I'd gotten there thirty seconds earlier, in time to stand in front of that snake with my potato rake and guard it across the road.

Whatever I could imagine, that snake was road pizza by the time I got to it. There was nothing to do but jot down the coordinates and temperature and hop back in the car.

The herping gods rarely show compassion, but maybe this is such an instance. I was feeling pretty demoralized by one of the worst possible omens to start a trip, when I saw the most beautiful road cruising vision possible.

It was a black rat snake (Pantherophis obsoleta) stretched half across the road.

I got down to her level for some photos, including the classic reared-up rat snake pose, trying to look big and tough in the face of a strange monster that poked a large glassy eye in her face.

I kept her attention on the camera and reached around to pick her up from behind. Pretty soon she was slowly exploring - not biting or whipping around, but not exactly sitting still for any more posed photos.

I could have spent all day like that, but I had turtles to catch. I had a hard time figuring out the best place to hop in.

Another snake showed up on the light gravel as I doubled back down the road, this time a garter (Thamnophis sirtalis)

This is about as close as I got to any basking map turtles (Graptemys geographica). Time after time I parked, scrambled down to the river and got in. I worked upstream, poking my head into brush piles and downed branches in the water for males (not finding any), and struggling to find the deep holes where I expected the bigger female turtles to be.

Crayfish were everywhere.

They uniformly faced me bravely with claws ready to do battle, and then (I suppose) cheered with triumph as the enormous four-limbed monster drifted on.

...to harass the local fish...

...and another garter snake, this time exploring a snag.

This is another one of those stories that ends, "and then at the last spot I checked..." as much because I wasn't going home until I found a map turtle as because of the luck of the day. In other words I would have gone home maybe an hour earlier if I'd found a map turtle at the previous spot.

What a beautiful river. It was a pleasure to even strike out to that point, to drift along, nestled between steep mountainsides with lush green banks to either bank.

What gave me hope was that I had finally found some deep holes, a stretch of river where the boulders and gravel went suddenly from knee-deep to way too far to reach even tippy-toes. I feel a sudden fear of falling in those initial moments, as if I need to brace for impact, before it occurs to me that I'm floating.

From there it's a dream of flying, the noise of the world muffled by water in my ears and the river bottom scrolling by in muted shades of green. There are monsters down there - here a muskie the size of my leg.

And finally, nestled in the downstream space under a boulder...

I got a good grip on her and got her above water for a few shots.

Note the puny tail on such an otherwise hefty turtle - another sign it's a girl.

I've still got this next shot on the wallpaper for my work computer. The closeup exaggerates the size of her head, but rest assured she was a bruiser. These map turtles are strongly sexually dimorphic (here's a post from last year showing a male and female together). The females are hefty turtles with broad, strong jaws for crushing snails and mussels. The males are half their size, with narrower heads suited to smaller, flimsier prey. I took the message of those opening jaws to heart and let her go.

I conclude this post by looking out at the cold sky, dark disgustingly early, and know that it's at least four and a half months until I can catch these turtles again. Winter sucks.

2010-12-19T13:05:00.001-08:00

Check out the 1st Anniversary House of Herrrrrrrrrrrrps!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2010-12-10T19:54:00.000-08:00

Is this what I’ve been reduced to? Watching birds through binoculars for lack of herping? Freezing weather can drive you to do strange things.

In all seriousness and fairness, though, I had a lovely time last week walking around the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center with Tony Croasdale, a birder friend who works at the Center and who put up a bird feeder right outside his office window so he’d have something to look at besides a computer screen.

We observed some of the common local feeder birds – a nuthatch, a downy woodpecker, titmice, juncos, mourning doves, and chickadees. Tony even helped me distinguish between the black-capped and the Carolina chickadees (black caps show more white on the wings).

I couldn’t walk around the park with Tony without flipping logs, though. Partly it’s habit, since I know there are no garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) with a high in the 40s, but I did manage to turn up a redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus), the lead-back phase. This time of year I was happy to see it.

2010-11-23T18:31:00.000-08:00

The end of the herping season has me thinking morbid thoughts. Green is dying back to brown, the earth fading into the cold stillness of winter.

Of course that's overly dramatic. The last post of marbled salamanders (Ambystoma opacum) guarding eggs shows that spring is already getting started. When those pools fill and ice over, little marbled salamander larvae will be swimming around the frigid water underneath.

Right now, though, I'm thinking about the bones I found.

I ran them by my erstwhile herping buddy Simon (now a veterinary pathologist) who guessed at a snake about the size of a black racer (Coluber constrictor) or black rat snake (Pantherophis obsoleta).

I had feared as much. In the spring we had found a dead, nearly intact (one ugly eye injury) black rat snake nearby. (I'm not sure why it would have made me feel any better to discover ANOTHER dead snake in the same spot.)

2010-11-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

Scott recently remarked on his growing appreciation for salamanders (this is a big deal if you know Scott, who is usually a major reptile chauvinist), pointing out the satisfaction of fixing our herping activities to their life cycles. I think we do this for reptiles as well - for example when I target female timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus) in the summer as they bask to warm the babies growing within them - but this sort of life cycle herping is more pronounced for the amphibians, and in particular for the mole salamanders (genus Ambystoma), aptly named for the subterranean lifestyle that makes them generally inaccessible, except for when they breed.

We seek the enormous tiger salamanders (A. tigrinum) in the winter rains that top off the vernal pools, the garishly-patterned spotted salamanders (A. maculatum) in the March showers that break the grip of winter, and in the fall we seek the marbled salamanders (A. opacum) waiting for the autumn rains that remind us that those dark-soil depressions in the woods hold water for half the year.

Somehow when I went out on Saturday I thought I might find spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata) at a beloved patch of woods where we find them in the spring. I should have known the pools would be too dry.

Here's a pool as it was in spring:

Here's the same pool last weekend:

Dry vernal pools in November mean there might be salamanders to uncover, though, so I decided to make the best of the situation and flip logs.

First and most numerous were the red backs (Plethodon cinereus), still a pleasure to find (they'll be annoying me in the spring when I'm sick of them and lusting after other quarry):

Finally one of the logs revealed something besides a red back or just nothing:

When the other local Ambystoma salamanders breed in their wet, explosive orgies, the marbled salamander babies will be swimming around, waiting for their cousins to hatch... so they can eat them. The marbled salamanders get to the pools and mate before the pools are even pools. The females pick a spot that will soon be underwater, lay their eggs, and then guard them until the water rises to where they are. At that point the eggs hatch and the larvae (kind of like tadpoles) swim away and get started on growing.

See all those eggs underneath her?

Another log right nearby revealed another marbled salamander, this one in a position that made it easier for me to pluck her up for a closer look.

I was about to write that "I know better than to anthropomorphize," but you know what? I don't. Although I don't think we can ascribe human thoughts to non-human animals, I do think that the same basic instincts drive us, so that when we see these salamanders guarding those eggs, we can say that they're feeling protective, or even maternal. I think they get angry when they see a hungry cricket come at the nest, terrified when an enormous monster lifts the roof off.

In that spirit of sympathy for the tough little women of the salamander world, I stopped looking under logs. Two was enough. I was also getting a little unsure of how well I was replacing the logs on top of the nests. Ordinarily the rule is replace the cover object, then release the herp. That way no one gets smooshed, and the critter will find its way back under on her own. In these two cases, however, I wasn't so sure she'd get back under with her eggs, so I put the logs back down on top of the salamanders and their eggs. I did it very slowly and very carefully, but I was still caught between the fear of crushing them and the concern that I would leave too much space around them, possibly letting the nest dry out too much.

I wished all the other marbled salamanders well in their rain vigils and hiked back to the car.

2010-11-10T15:22:00.000-08:00

Just because it's November and the temperatures are in the 50s, it doesn't mean you can't go out turtling. I don't think I'm jumping in after these guys with the water as chilly as it is, but the Manayunk Canal's horde of invasive red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta) was well represented on the snags and logs. In retrospect this might mean I should have been wading around somewhere looking for spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata), but it was inspiring to see.

2010-11-07T18:29:00.000-08:00

Sure there are piles of debris and unsavory goings on after dark, but how many tombstones are this welcoming? In full disclosure, I straightened the mat out a little bit, but that's where it was, near a few of those trash piles.

The above is a shot of a dumpster that I think was placed there for cleaning up the trash piles. It's been there for at least four months now.

I know, the Mt. Moriah Cemetery, straddling the Philadelphia/Yeadon border, is strewn with trash even at its best, but this year it's gotten way out of hand. I am having a harder and harder time finding the piles small enough to get to the bottom of, let along the single and big pieces that the brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) like to hide under.

...like three mattresses that I used to adore.

Of course they were probably used by prostitutes, but when lifted (with a potato rake - as little skin contact as possible) they frequently revealed browns and garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis).

The trash isn't all that works against the cemetery. The Japanese knotweed continues to overwhelm the rest of the vegetation. I liked this image of the knotweed vying for space with the multiflora rose. I did find a few red backed salamanders (Plethodon cinereus). See the gray one (lead-back phase)?

Give them credit; they appear just when our hearts are sinking with the winter breezes, and display some spunk in hand. This little guy knows the ground is somewhere between these fingers.

2010-10-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

Success smells like snake musk. The plainly foul and potent fluid that snakes release from glands at the base of their tails gets on you and sticks with you. In a case of simple conditioning, we who love to catch snakes get a little thrill any time we smell it. On the way home from a fun trip I'll get another whiff of it and get that flash memory of the snake itself.

I thought I had learned to love all snake musk - from the rounder funk of the water snakes (Nerodia), garter snakes (Thamnophis), brown snakes (Storeria), and their relatives to the more bitter, acrid bite (notes of burning tire) of the common king snake (Lampropeltis getula) - but on Saturday a northern water snake (Nerodia sipedon) shocked even me.

I had spotted the snake in the other lane as I rounded a bend in the farm and marsh country along the Delaware Bay in New Jersey. I slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car, and ran back to the snake as it froze and then started to retreat (thinking to myself - 'not a rat snake' - too chunky).

Water snakes are common almost anywhere there is fresh water in our region. They are chunky snakes that can give the impression of being longer than they are - you'll rarely see them much bigger than three feet. Somewhere under the layer of mud they are patterned with broken hourglass bands of dark red on gray that can fade almost to even gray in bigger water snakes.

They are almost uniformly unpleasant to catch. The scared water snake puts up a savage defense, pooping and musking liberally and biting repeatedly, leaving lots of shallow scratches that bleed a bit more than you expect thanks to saliva that is toxic to their fish and amphibian prey but just a mild anticoagulant to us.

Somehow I got away from this one without any bleeding. I am getting better at this. Sometimes catching a snake means grabbing it however you can, but if you can occupy its attention with one hand, camera, or face while you lightly grab and pick up its back end with the other, you can often get away without any bites - good for the snake as well as more pleasant for you. (note that Scott opposes this, maintaining that the bite is part of the experience; to avoid it is to wimp out) I handled the snake a moment, relishing the feel of its cool, roughly keeled scales, and then put it down.

Only back in the car did I get a full sense of the stench. I'm not sure why this was so much more powerful than I've ever noticed for a water snake (and I've caught a lot of water snakes, all of which musked on me) - had the snake been saving up? a yet-undocumented musk mutation? a fungal infection of the musk glands?

I had decided I could stomach this for the ride home (betting it wouldn't stick in the car), but then Jen called to tell me to run by the drug store on the way home, and I knew there was no way I, in good conscience, could stand in line with other humans smelling like that. I stopped at the next rest stop and scrubbed my arms down.

This was an otherwise lame trip - I checked out some public land I had wondered about and found little exciting. I did, however, flip the first red-back salamander (Plethodon cinereus) of my fall herping. By the end of March I'll be too sick of these ubiquitous little guys to take any more photos, but here's the first one in all its glory.

Under the log:

In hand:

making a break for it up my forearm:

Addendum:

What does this can say?

Why? Because even after about 35 years, it will still be where you left it and eleven others where you were drinking them in the woods.

2010-10-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

I might be rationalizing myself into a herping triumph with this one, but here goes.

Remember the spring? Remember when the rains started and the frogs started calling in loud, horny choruses? One of my repeated memories of spring (happens every year, so the experiences all sort of blend together) is walking through such a chorus, surrounded on all sides by load frogs peeping, trilling, honking away (depending on the species) and not able to spot a single one. They're there, assuming Scott hasn't played an elaborate practical joke on me using dozens of tiny, perfectly camouflaged speakers, but they're tucked into the weeds and fall silent as soon as I get close, playing on my greatest herping weakness - my lack of patience.

The worst of the spring crypto-callers (for me at least) is the New Jersey chorus frog (Pseudacris triseriata). Where I hear them they tend to call from the mossy skirts hanging from emergent shrubs in seasonal pools, and up until recently I had never laid eyes on one, even though I had heard scores of them.

Jen and I had taken a trip down to a beach on the Delmarva Peninsula - an early fall getaway to take advantage of the cheaper prices and smaller crowds, but of course I had to look around for critters. We took to a nearby wooded park (where we ran into another Philly-area herper in the parking lot - small world) that looked absolutely perfect for spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata): holly and oak, greenbriar, and seasonal wetland just starting to fill up again.

I think we spotted one basking on a log with a group of painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) - the bottom-most turtle in this shot:

We heard plenty of green frogs (Rana clamitans) hopping into the pools as we went. Here's one that hadn't quite spooked yet:

We rolled every log we saw, targeting marbled salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum) but finding none. These chunky salamanders, dazzlingly patterned with metallic silver on black, breed in the fall, the females laying eggs at the dry edges of vernal pools and guarding them until the water rises to submerge the eggs and allow them to hatch.

We struck out on the marbleds, but did gain more solid proof that we were in spotted turtle country (damn raccoons):
We struck out one more time on the way home. We had stopped at a parcel of land where Scott and I have seen oodles of marbled salamander larvae in the winter as we looked for tiger salamanders.

I kept catching glimpses of little creatures hopping away in the leaf litter overlaying the wet, spongy bottom of a large vernal pool. 'No, not grasshoppers,' I thought to myself, but had the damndest time getting a good look. I'd see the motion and then couldn't find the critter. After letting a few go with a shrug (then back to looking under logs) I pursued one and came up with this:

See it?
Here's a closer look:

I have to say I was impressed at the elegance of the little guy. I might just be inflating my opinion to compensate for all the effort I have put into this moment over the repeatedly failed stalking sessions, but I enjoyed my very first look at a New Jersey chorus frog.

2010-10-21T04:02:00.000-07:00

House of HERRRRRRRRRRRRPS!

This month's House of Herps theme is "Bring on the Rain," which doesn't just make sense in a Northeast United States theme of waiting for the fall rains that bring out the tiger salamanders (Ambystoma tigrinum) but in a South African sense of waiting for spring over at Mainly Mongoose. Dig Ted MacRae's stunning tiger salamander.