Last month I checked out a big tract of vacant land in North Philly. I felt a little skittish to explore it all on my own, but last week I recruited Scott to join me on a more thorough exploration.

I could have a lot of fun here. Though I am sure plenty of sketchy stuff happens there, all the kids riding around on their dirt bikes and ATVs and the ordinary-looking guys with their kids fishing in the river put us at ease.

And there are a ton of snakes, all a short and easy bike ride from my office. Of course they're common snakes - garters (Thamnophis sirtalis) and browns (Storeria dekayi) - but they were everywhere, and some of them were lookers.

Of course my iPhone took the blurriest photos of the pretty ones:




But the volume in such a short period of time walking around seemed to make up for that disappointment.

 

And there's something cool about the ruins, about a thriving industrial site now overtaken by a mix of natural forces (trees, meadows) and human (graffiti):

Here's another garter snake DOR on 27th at the base of the South Street Bridge, pretty much the exact same spot as the one from the beginning of the month. It is certainly a sign from the herping gods that I need to explore back in there.

On Sunday I finally did something about the fact that Magnolia had never met a timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus). I realize that sentence could look alarming to a non-herper, and I mean it in a very safe sense: Magnolia would 'meet' a rattlesnake at a distance of several yards, well above the ground from the safety of a baby carrier strapped to my chest. Nonetheless I wanted to get my new favorite person in the world out into one of my favorite habitats with some of my favorite creatures. Even if we struck out we'd be enjoying the sunshine, fresh air, and new sounds and textures of the woods on top of a mountain.

I also was interested in testing the concept of taking the baby out on a mountain hike. I figured it couldn't be much harder than slogging through a marsh with the mud sucking back on my hip waders, but still I had some questions about balance and endurance while climbing and hiking.

I'll admit to more caution than I usually display on these trips. I was less willing to be surprised by a rattler coiled a few feet away, and so avoided brushier sections of forest floor. Hopping from boulder gave way to more careful stepping, and precarious short cuts to more-deliberately picked routes.

And of course I got a late start. The general challenges of preparing a baby for a long car ride followed by a hike were compounded by the clear and sunny weather on Sunday. Rattlers tend not to linger in the sun if they can warm up quickly, so that they are most easily observed in hazy or even cloudy conditions. Strong sun means that they can heat up in a few minutes and then retreat out of sight, making it harder to spot them compared to cloudier conditions in which they might spend hours out in plain view.

Thus I excuse the poor results. We saw one rattler in a spot I could have seen at least five in better weather, but I'll take it. Any rattler is a magical beast,with a commanding presence and heavy grace. This one buzzed at us from the middle of the path ahead as I came down off a slab where we had spent a few minutes hanging out (and changing a diaper).



At first I thought we had startled it as it had been crossing the path. I took a few photos and backed off, waiting for the snake to move. It did not. I gave it a little more time, but it stayed put, buzzing each time I moved. Finally I picked a long detour around its position and starting looking elsewhere. Still it sat in the middle of the path, now in a more comfortably relaxed coil.



I wondered at that point if it hadn't been crossing the path at all, but rather setting up to bask when we had walked up on it. Sure enough it was still there a few minutes later, soaking up the sun.



The buzzing that I had had interpreted as pure fear now seemed more like a wary, angry message, 'get the hell off my lawn!'

With that, and a growing ache from my lower back, I decided to head for the car a few miles away. On route we saw one of Pennsylvania's omnipresent pickerel frogs (Lithobates palustris) hop into a seasonal puddle.

I'm not sure what tadpoles these might be, maybe wood frog (Lithobates sylvatica)?

 

Last weekend I was invited to lead a herping walk with Master Naturalist students at the Schuylkill Center for EnvironmentalEducation. I think this is a fabulous idea: an opportunity for nature-interested folks to round out their knowledge of the natural world. 

The property is covered with wonderful milk snake microhabitat (taking as given that all of Northwest Philadelphia’s rocky hillsides are good general habitat). The class leader, Director of Education Virginia Ranly, pointed to the piles of wood chips and said their land manager often finds milk snakes (Lampropeltis triangulum) when he moves them. I sighed and knew that unless I spent all morning digging I probably wouldn’t find any. She also mentioned some ruins and rock piles that also host milks, and, most-tempting, black rat snakes (Pantherophis obsoleta). 

Herpers quickly learn that there can be miles of distance between ‘often’ or even ‘all the time’ and ‘reliably’ when it comes to finding the critter we’re looking for. Locals will tell you they see milk snakes ‘all the time,’ and the herper will run out to check the spot and find none. When you actually ask what they mean by ‘all the time,’ i.e. on what proportion of trips do they actually see the critter, you realize why the herpers come up dry. Figure the land manager is out there on the property doing things that will turn up milk snakes pretty much every day. I’ll bet he sees a milk snake no more than once a week in the spring and early summer. If I saw a notable bird that often I would also refer to seeing it ‘all the time,’ but in practice that might boil down to dozens of hours of time per snake found. 

Luckily you CAN reliably find many other species at the Center. You can start, for example, with the painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) that bask around the pond in the parking lot. If you get close to the edge of the pond, frogs and toads (green – Lithobates clamitans, pickerel – Lithobates palustris, American toads – Bufo americanus) will launch themselves into the water. 

The green frogs won’t even bother to jump when you approach the human-made ponds along the trails. They just sit there like fat little frog statues while their tadpole offspring wriggle around the shallow water. 

We found that it wasn’t too hard to turn up dusky salamanders (Desmognathus fuscus) and even larval two-lines (Eurycea bislineata) in the streams, newts (Notopthalmus viridiscens)  in one of the ponds, and of course red-backed salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) in the woods. 

Somehow I forgot to photograph most of this. 

I did remember to take a photo of a garter snake basking from between the rocks of the wall around the Center's greenhouse. 

 

On the way there and back I made sure to spy on the turtles of the Manayunk Canal. As usual most were the out-of-place red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta),descendents of released pets, but I am pretty sure most of these guys are our native red-bellies (Pseudemys rubriventris).

Last, here are some of the interloper sliders (natives of primarily the Mississippi drainage) on a rock in the Schuylkill not far up from the Fairmount Dam. 

I'm given to understand that babies and snapping turtles (Chelydra serpentina) don't mix well. As much as I think every child should know how to properly handle a snapping turtle, I decided 5 months is a little too young. I also found it challenging to try to wrangle a snapping turtle that weighed about as much as the baby on my back, with a diaper bag dangling in front of me (I still have to figure out how to load everything just right). So I took the lame pic with the turtle detained but not quite caught, and then let it go to burrow through the mud.



I had found it by kicking. I hesitate to call this a proper herping technique, but when you're wading/slogging through your favorite marsh, you need to stop and investigate any hard object you happen to run into. Most will be old stumps, maybe even a rock, depending on the substrate, but this one proved to be round (as I probed it with the handle of my potato rake - I hesitate to reach into the mud until I know which end is the head and which is the tail), not fixed to the bottom, and indeed a turtle.

Here's the tadpole update. They're fewer and bigger:

Another puddle held some just-hatching toad (Bufo americanus) tadpoles, still hanging out along the empty jelly of their egg string.

Nothing unusual about this scene: a road jerky garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis), one that met its rubber-tire fate like so many others.

What's unusual is where I found it. Here's the 'habitat shot.'

Some Philadelphians might recognize the intersection at the base of the South Street Bridge on 27th (what Lombard curves into). I was riding home from work, as I do nearly every day, and though I was riding fast and thinking about who knows what as I neared the curve onto the bridge, the forever-herping part of my brain pulled the brake lever. I hopped onto the sidewalk and took the photo. I suppose it came off the vegetation running along the railroad tracks at the edge of the river, maybe from the park.

Here's the satellite image.

Railroad tracks are a classic setting for herping, where you'll walk along flipping old ties, but in rural settings, not in urban Philadelphia. Maybe I should give it a shot.

A week and a half ago I got to check out the fishway at the Fairmount Dam on the Schuylkill River. Note that I wrote 'fishway' and not 'fish ladder.' Sometimes it gets called a fish ladder, but this is more of a series of compartments lined up in a switchback and dropping a bit each one and looking less like  a ladder than some that you see out West, where the salmon can leap better than can our less-athletic shad.

The fish use of the fishway was fascinating, but of course I had to ask about the reptiles they see. Back at the Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center (the most underrated museum in the City) they have video of a northern water snake (Nerodia sipedon) using it. They see lots of red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta) too, but what intrigued me were the spiny soft-shelled turtles (Apalone spinifera). These are strange-looking, flat turtles with long noses and, as you might guess by the name, leathery skin in place of their shell. They look like a turtle that melted a bit in the sun.

These are native to most of the rest of the country; they live in the Ohio River drainage in western PA, but the ones we have are descended from released turtles (most likely food turtles, not pets). They most famously live in the Maurice River drainage in South Jersey, but I've seen them in a creek in Bucks County, I've heard reports from the Delaware up around Easton, and I've seen photos of big females from the Heinz NWR. So it's not shocking that they'd see them, but still interesting, and tempting to keep me looking a little more carefully from the bridges over the Schuylkill and, I hope soon, from the Raftemys 2.

Tuesday morning I headed out of the house smelling kind of like a pumpkin pie. I had dropped by the Grid offices Monday, where a grateful local soap maker had recently dropped off a variety box. This was a fortuitous coincidence, since I had just run out of soap and soap is the kind of thing I keep forgetting to get (I forget about it as soon as I'm out of the shower) leaving me with the mini soaps scavenged from hotels and meant for house guests. The downside was that it was oatmeal spice, particularly heavy on the nutmeg. As I walked around an enormous vacant plot after work I kept catching a whiff of nutmeg and wondering 'what the heck is...? Oh right, it's me.'



The lot had come from a tip from another herper, that a nonherper had found a baby black rat snake (Pantherophis obsoleta) there a few years ago. Now, readers of this blog know of my black rat snake infatuation (dig my profile photo), so the thought of a black rat snake within the borders of Philadelphia is enough to draw me anywhere.

This spot looked great, though with enough homeless encampments and detritus of unsavory activity to limit my explorations until I can come back with a herping buddy.

I did flip a few of the usual urban snake suspects. One chunk of concrete hit three of the garters (Thamnophis sirtalis) and at least one of the browns (Storeria dekayi). Here are a couple in hand (brown on the left, garter on the right).

Both made sure to liberally douse my hand with feces, uric acid, and musk. I no longer smell like nutmeg.