I've been getting up to the mountains less often than I would like, but over Memorial Day weekend I managed a trip to an entirely new spot (for me at least). I haven't done this in at least a year - visit a new place during optimal rattlesnake searching weather (I've scouted new places in winter, but I haven't gone back to check them out in season).

As usual, I was late. The weather was sunnier and warmer than I would have preferred for rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus), and even though I had gotten up obscenely early and the roads were clear, I knew that by the time I reached my south-facing hillside destination the sun would have a few hours jump on me and that it would feel hot, whatever the forecast said. I guess I'd have had to have woken up a couple hours before dawn to reach the slope around the same time as the sun, but I still felt delinquent about it.

Whatever I would find that day, I would earn it, I thought as I hiked nearly straight up the ridge, breaking away from the trail when it stopped going my way. I crested the ridge, already sweating profusely, and checked my coordinates. Something rustled beside me, and I took this little American toad as a good omen.




I followed the top of the ridge a little while, and then dropped pretty much straight down the ridge, which continued to pitch steeper and steeper as I went.

In the summer the foliage keeps you from getting clear views of the rocks and cliffs until you're right up on them. Teasing glimpses of gray or white keep you hacking through the next greenbriar or blackberry thicket (note to self: this spot will taste fabulous in another month), and after a few such patches that yielded nothing, I hit a cliff face I couldn't manage. I turned uphill and started scrambling, hacking up the 50 degree pitch (I'm not exaggerating; I checked it on Google Earth) to the top of that particular cliff.

Greenbriar doesn't have the worst thorns of the forest, but its long, flexible vines do a great job of wrapping around your leg and then tripping you before you realize they've started puncturing your pants and your skin. I end up taking big, sweeping strides to negotiate greenbriar, either stepping over it or trying to trap it down with the sole of my boot so that I can clear it without any trouble.

I was taking just such a long step, focusing on catching the briars with my boot when the pattern recognition part of my brain sounded the alarm.

I was aiming my foot only a few inches away from the most perfectly coiled, pretty little yellow timber rattler basking in just a dapple of sunshine on the leaf litter (the shot above from after the light had shifted a little, the one below earlier in the photo session).

The combination of my heart already pounding from the exertion and then the adrenalin rush of nearly stepping on a rattler, PLUS the general thrill of having validated the whole trip with the target species, clean overwhelmed me. I took a couple photos (that little rattler didn't flinch, but I did see it breathing hard) and then called Scott and babbled incoherently until I calmed down.

I took a drink of water, took some more photos, and bid the little guy farewell. I found a couple more rattlers - one I saw, and one I only heard duck away under the boulder next to the one I was standing on.


The way that girl was tucked in among the boulders and the alacrity with which the other had hid implied that finding any others was going to be hard; they were already warmed up and jumpy. I hiked around a bit more, in scouting mode more than hunting mode.

I was late getting home too. I tore myself off the slope too late and then booked it back down through the woods again.

These woods were mostly deciduous, with lots of chestnut oak trees, with bark textured with blocky ridges and long, wavily indented leaves. As I was charging along through the woods, though, a sapling caught my eye.

That wasn't a chestnut oak. In fact, it looked like... a real chestnut tree? These were wiped out by the chestnut blight a hundred years ago. Some of the old roots keep sending up shoots that grow for a few years before the blight strikes them down again.

I thought "huh, that's cool," and then kept on trucking. It was only later that I realized I should have written down the coordinates. The PA chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation needs to know about all the trees we find; the better to build up a genetically diverse, resistant base of chestnut trees to repopulate our woodlands.

I felt a little bad for missing the major toad (Bufo americanus) breeding migration this spring. The horny little guys moved a couple weeks earlier than usual, and just like last year animal-loving volunteers with the Toad Detour project were out around the Roxborough Reservoir, escorting the toads across the street and blocking off the busiest stretches at peak toad/traffic activity.

Of course we all hate to see toads get squashed by tires, but this project has an important urban/suburban ecological dimension as well. Road mortality, as biologists tend to phrase it, is an important threat to reptile and amphibian populations nationwide. You see the effects (reduced populations) of a road for several hundred yards in either direction, and when you add that kind of buffer on either side of every road, you see most of our region's herpetafauna sapped by car traffic. This is one of the strongest arguments against sprawl for me. The more we leave our urban centers and stretch our suburbs out into the country, the more we build up our road networks and dice up habitat into unsustainable little chunks. Every time someone moves out to the woods (or the desert, or the shore...), he or she is adding another car that will kill a few more critters and contributing to the sprawl that will attract even more people.

Not all roads are equally damaging; a lot depends on how heavy the traffic is and how habitat is situated relative to the roads. The Upper Roxborough Reservoir has been out of use for decades and slowly turning into a wetland, perfect for toad breeding. The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education and its expansive uplands woodlands property sits across Port Royal Rd., making for a classic road mortality arrangement - a road that must be crossed by the entire breeding population. To make things worse, some new housing subdivisions nearby have boosted the human population of the neighborhood and the traffic on that road.

Here's a shot of the reservoir and the surrounding terrain. Port Royal runs from northeast to southwest across the image, with the Schuylkill Environmental Center to the west and southwest of the ball fields:


Of course the migration isn't a single, simple event. The adults go from their woodland and backyard homes to the reservoir and then hop back home once they're done breeding. Their eggs hatch into tadpoles, and then the tadpoles grow little legs, absorb their tails, and set off into the big, scary world.

Port Royal Road is one of the first major obstacles for these toadlets, and last weekend I finally got to help the Toad Detour folks as we blocked off Port Royal again and kept an eye on the incredibly tiny metamorphs as they skittered over the pavement.


Aren't they cute?

In some places it was hard to walk without stepping on them. You had to put your foot down very slowly to give them time to hop out of the way.

Even I was surprised at how darn tiny the little toads are. I took a couple shots with the usual herp photography size references to give you a sense of their size:

Other critters were moving too, namely some pickerel frogs (Rana palustris); unfortunately the only one I got to see was this unlucky frog:


The Toad Detour folks still need volunteers. Also please feel free to drop me an email and I can get you connected to the volunteer coordinator.

A few weeks ago I got an interesting request - for a guest post on a UK Reptile Forum website called, fittingly, Reptile Forums, UK. It's a lovely website with great discussions and advice about keeping reptiles and amphibians as pets, but my assignment was to lay out the thrills of herping to a crowd that might not play with wild frogs and snakes very often. Check out the post and see what you think.

On Friday June 25th at 8pm the Delaware Valley Herpetological Society is delighted to be hosting writer Bryan Christy, author of the Lizard King, a fun and slightly scary (for the animal lovers and conservationists) book about the reptile smuggling business. Check out our website for more info.

Welcome to the House of Herps Number Six!

When I first learned that HOH was launching in December I thought Jason and Amber were nuts. Why? Because May is clearly the best month of the year for herping! Spring is now well underway; all our scaly and slippery friends are running around stuffing their faces with their unlucky neighbors and getting lucky with their, well, luckier neighbors.

On the lucky side, JSK of Anyone Seen My Focus? presents a post about a male fence lizard flashing his sexiest blue breeding colors.


Ted MacRae at Beetles in the Bush presents a closely related Florida scrub lizard from his August trip to the Lake Wales Ridge.



Johnny Nutcase over at Count Your Chicken! caught a nice look at a gopher snake getting all warmed up and ready for action.




Matthew Wills of Backyard and Beyond up in New York City spotted a really nice snapping turtle (possibly the cleanest snapper I've ever seen) swimming around in a Prospect Park pond and dreaming of goslings to munch on.



Seabrooke Leckie over at The Marvelous in Nature waylaid a painted turtle for a photo session, showing off those long claws that the males use this time of year in courtship, shaking them in the female's face and stroking her neck.



Amber Coakley spotted a lonely gray treefrog singing his little heart out, guarding his turf and maybe serenading some little female frog out of sight.



Rambling Woods wondered whether a hefty snapper she found was out on a booty call (either that or a snack run, given the time of year).



Cindy down at Dipper Ranch adopts the gentle method of dealing with the rattlers that pop up around her barn, and gives us a handy primer in telling them from the gopher snakes munching on the local gophers.



Buckeye Herper Jason Folt (stuck up in Michigan, no place for a Buckeye herper to be) waded into 42 degree lake water with his herping buddy Cid (for the non-herpers out there, this is how it's done) to catch mudpuppies (a.k.a. water dogs).



On a more somber note, this May, and likely a few more Mays going forward have been ruined by a mix of accident, corporate irresponsibility, delinquently lax government oversight, and, of course, our own collective demand for cheap oil. David Steen at Living Alongside Wildlife draws the connection from that gushing well to the sea turtles he's gotten to know along the Florida Panhandle.

I'll wind up with my own post about the black and tawny kings and queens of my herping world, the timber rattlers that still reign over Pennsylvania's rocky mountainsides. These are the sleepy heads of the herp world, taking their sweet time to leave their hibernacula for their summer hunting grounds.

I hope you enjoy the posts, and then immediately get outside to enjoy the rest of herping's finest month.

Happy Herping!

I don't like driving far to go herping; I'm an inveterate localist. I try to stick within an hour range of home, but I'll stretch that for timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus). No other herp in our region has quite the same presence, the gravitas of a full grown velvet-tail.

I'm not greedy; I'll head to the hills for a glimpse at a one or two nice rattlers, sufficient to give me a pleasant buzz for the rest of the week, but last spring Scott and I stumbled into a scene we had only dreamed of. (I mean that literally - we both have very similar, repeating dreams of stumbling into piles of turtles or snakes, so many that we don't know what to do with all of them.) On that very real morning last May (2009), we were hiking towards a ledge on which I had seen a pregnant female basking the previous August (2008), scrambling and rock hopping over a talus field of large-appliance sized boulders when Scott pulled up short, his face seized by a mix of shock and wonder.

He was looking at a heap of timber rattlers, what I've since learned is colloquially called a 'pile up.' Here are a couple shots of the pile up, one from that first day (taken by Scott), another from a little later in the season:


We had found a rookery site, where gravid female rattlers spend the spring and summer basking in the sun together. They don't eat much for that season; they just focus on keeping their body temperatures up.

In late summer the girls had their babies, giving us some beautiful images of baby rattlers cuddling with their mamas in the sun (the first one by Eitan):


Gravid female rattlers stick close to their hibernation dens (a.k.a. hibernacula - timber rattlers den communally, generally at the same spot year to year), and last fall I suspected that I had found the den site at which all these snakes spend the winter. Here is a shot of three rattlers cozily basking in the October sun, sort of arranged in an equilateral triangle - see if you can spot all three.


I made a quick trip in early April, which is early for finding rattlers. If you know exactly where the actual hole or crack in the ground inside of which they're shacking up, you can find them basking right there, but last fall I had only narrowed it down to the right talus slope, which had a whole lot holes and cracks in the ground. Here is a pic of a similar talus slope to give people a sense of the terrain (note that I'm really careful not to specify where we're going - our code name for the spot is "Forbidden Ridge," and that's about as specific as I'll get):


On the first of May I made a trip back out there, and I brought some friends so I could be sure I saw the rattlers if they were out there. My herping buddy Eitan (whose herping page is still the finest personal herping page on the web) drove me up, and at Forbidden Ridge we met up with two other herpers, Dave and Chris, rattler bloodhounds of sorts whom I've long admired, specialists in scouting good habitat and sniffing out the snakes.

We hoofed it up to the slope, I feeling a little nervous - organizer's jitters as the guy leading three other guys who had driven a long way to find the snakes I had told them were there. My anxiety peaked as we huddled at the base of the supposed den talus slope. I pointed to where I had seen the snakes in the fall, and we started up, ready to step slowly from rock to rock, looking and listening (not for rattling - that doesn't take much focus to notice - but for the rustling slide of a snake slipping back into a shadow.).

We didn't look long: "There's one," Chris matter of factly stated a few steps up the slope. I let out a deep breath, knowing the day wasn't a total waste. From there it only got better, with each of us seeing multiple snakes as we moved up the slope, more or less confirming that this was indeed where they spent the winter.

The sun was strong, which meant the snakes didn't need to expose themselves very much to warm up, making for very few decent poses (we did not touch the snakes to reposition them.), but here's a nice yellow-phase snake in full sun and full glory:

We saw a few clustered around a nice looking hole in the ground as well, making us wonder if this is THE spot:

We saw several more snakes at other spots, though all pretty spread out, giving us the sense that some had started dispersing to their summer hunting grounds and rookery spots. Here is one cozy black-phase snake:

... and not too far away, evidence of another exciting creature that roams that ridge:

We usually see piles of bear poop, but I guess this one left a little more behind.

I saw a lot of this:

That's Chris getting photos of a snake - time after time he'd call out another snake he'd found, leaving me to scramble up behind him to record the coordinates and get my own photo (I report the finds to the PA Herp Atlas Project).

I'll wind up with the last snake we saw. I was standing on a boulder, peering around and chatting with Dave and Chris who were spread out a few yards away, when I heard that little bit of rustling nearby. I looked down to see this guy tucked in between the rocks where I wouldn't have been able to see it from any other angle.

I've been telling Scott and Simon for years that I ought to dump a few snapping turtles (Chelydra serpentina) into the Centennial Lakes in Fairmont Park West, off Belmont Ave. On earlier trips Jen and I had seen a ton of bullfrogs (Rana caterbeiana), but more relevant to the snappers, we also had also seen lots of snails. I figured any muddy, smelly, trash-choked urban pond full of fat snails needs a snapping turtle, the perfect monster to drag itself through the mud and scare the local kids. It might even gobble up a few of the goslings too.

A couple weekends ago, Jen and I started at Lowes to get some gardening supplies. Then we flipped concrete chunks on Jefferson behind the Lowes (found one brown snake - Storeria dekayi - it got away), and then we hit the lakes. The lakes are a remnant of the great Centennial exhibition of 1876, when Philadelphia celebrated our nation's 100th birthday in grand style in the new Fairmont Park. Learn more about plans (as yet unfunded) to restore this potentially gorgeous stretch of Fairmont Park West to its former glory here.



The bullfrogs fled before us, as usual, splashing in just before we could get good looks at them, let alone photograph them (I'm really bad at spotting frogs before they move.). The herd of Canada geese ambled out of our way too, grumbling as they went.

Then I spotted a turtle. This one was basking on a rock in the middle, certainly not a snapper, and most likely a released red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans). Without binoculars I couldn't be certain, so I decided to take a photograph I could then blow up on the computer and examine more closely.


The plastron (belly) looked yellow to us, consistent with it being a slider, but I wanted a good look at its head to be sure. For the best angle for the photo, catching the head without shooting into the sun, I needed to get to the island in the middle of the lake. The water level was low enough on the west side of the lake for me to walk out (this is part of a restoration project), so we walked west along the sidewalk on the north side, working to where the exposed mud had hardened enough for me to cross without sinking in.

On our way along that north edge of the water, Jen pointed at the murky shallows a couple feet in and shouted that she saw a small turtle. I saw it too, though not quite well enough to ID it. I stepped in and grabbed, stirring up some of that mud and further obscuring the turtle, and just got a handle on the back of its 4-inch shell. Then it whipped its head, on the end of a surprisingly long neck, back at my hand in a snapper-style strike. I reflexively let go for a second (a cowardly failure I am loathe to admit). As the turtle ran into deeper water, I made the quick decision not to jump headlong into the foul storm water runoff and the mud - mostly goose poop plus whatever settles out of storm water runoff after having been rinsed off the streets of West Philly - and watched the little snapper get away.

Scott and Simon have both shot down my snapper-stocking idea repeatedly (I won't let it rest) - tinkering excessively with the herpetological order of the universe, they say. I suppose it's possible that there are snappers breeding in there already, but I doubt that adults would leave so many snails in there and no other signs of large snappers - namely tracks through the exposed mud. Someone else must have released the little one.

Feeling elated at the snapper discovery, but also a bit of a failure for not catching it AND scooped by whatever irresponsible pet owner who had released the turtle and unwittingly beat me to the punch, I continued to the island for my photo.

I passed a goose pair incubating eggs.


I got closer to the perfect vantage point but noticed two more geese that didn't look like they planned on getting out of my way.

I still had a few yards to go, but they weren't budging, just hissing obstinately and waving their heads up and down.

Here's the best shot I could get. I can just make out the red stripe on the head; it's a slider.

Scott likes to talk about our white whales. I don't know if every single herper out there is obsessed with finding some critter in particular, but a lot of us are. A lot of us will make repeated trips to the same spot where someone's friend says he saw one ten years ago (maybe working on even flimsier data than that), or maybe we'll find perfect habitat for some rare, cryptic species and continue visiting it in the hopes that we'll be the first person to put that extra push pin on the map, to turn the potential into the real.

I have abandoned my white whale, gritting my teeth and withstanding the intense, internal compulsion to repeatedly go to Northwest Philadelphia - rocky hillsides in the Wissahickon and elsewhere in Roxborough or Manayunk where Philadelphia's milk snake (Lampropeltis triangulum) population resides. I know they're there - I found one in 2005, and Scott and I found one dead on the road (DOR in herper terms) a couple years ago. Friends who work for Fairmont Park report occasional sightings, as in 'Oh yeah, Bob saw one next to the golf course last year.' I've heard enough of those recent sightings to feel confident that there are a decent number of the snakes out there, but they've resisted my efforts since 2005 to find them intentionally.

Short of moving to one of those houses on Wise's Mill Rd. and hoping one will cross my path on my way out the door, I'm not sure that searching for them will yield any results. I can make another twenty trips and flip another few hundred rocks, and all I'll turn up is red back salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) and the odd ring neck snake (Diadophis punctatus). Milk snakes are like this - in some places you might find a whole bunch in one day, and then the rest of the year see no evidence of them no matter how hard you look (I've read this in books written by professionals, so it's not just my incompetence talking).

By frustrating contrast, there are also places where milk snakes are common AND easy to find, where 'that board' will almost always yield a strong, shiny milk snake with those beautiful red eyes. Scott and I now have one of those boards (actually a piece of metal), at a site we visit frequently to search for marsh wildlife. Give us mild temperatures and some sun to heat the metal, and we'll turn up one, maybe two milk snakes.

Here's one we caught there for an Earth Day walk last year - young and still looking sharp with the crimson pattern on the gray background.

Here's another we've found a couple times this year under that wonderful piece of metal.

Milk snake colors fade to brown as they age, but I'm pretty sure the shapes of their blotches and head patterns stay the same. After a lot of staring back at forth at the pictures, I'm pretty sure these are different snakes - both handsome serpents, even if the second one is a bit more orange. Along with another we found last year (with an distinctively different pattern) and a baby Scott has found this year, I think we've found at least four different milk snakes under this one piece of metal. I do feel that it's worth noting that we have never found any other milk snakes under any other piece of cover on the property, though the owners do report seeing them from time to time.

About that white whale - does finding milk snakes elsewhere satisfy my urge to find them in Philadelphia? Absolutely not. At every sunny spring day I still feel the very strong urge to drop everything and head to Roxborough.

I'll wind up with a spotted turtle I saw on the same property as the milk snakes. This is one we've caught four or five times by now. He started out at one location where we think they hibernate, and recently made a trip of about a hundred yards to another section of marsh.

Check out House of Herps #5 - a really elegantly done edition, tied together with poetry verses. I'll be hosting May, so this really ups the ante for the Philly Herping presentation of HOH.

The Quick Snake Fix

About a week ago I got hit with a fierce snake craving. I needed to find a snake, hold it, even smell the musk on my hand. I had been working from home, which I don't always do, and felt pulled in two by the need to finish what I was doing and the knowledge that somewhere outside the window behind me, well within reasonable striking distance, there were snakes.

I held out until 6ish, the decision to finally go acting like a released rubber band, snapping me out the door and onto my bike, skimming through the streets of West Philly. I headed for the Woodlands Cemetery, a well-groomed, historic cemetery with a resident brown snake (Storeria dekayi) population and garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) that (I think) wander up from the Schuylkill to hunt worms and slugs.



I've been finding them under one particular pile of old logs, but each log that I lifted revealed nothing but arthropods (insects, spiders, pill bugs, centipedes, etc.), mollusks (slugs), and annelids (worms) - nothing wrong with those phyla, but they don't do it for me like the vertebrates with the most vertebrae (yes, I know that vertebrates are a subphylum).

Feeling a little crestfallen, I walked back to my bicycle, but happened to pass by a board I hadn't noticed before (how I hadn't noticed such a nice board before is its own embarrassing question):

It was in a nice spot, near some brushy growth that the target snakes might like for hunting grounds:

I pried the board up and with that delicious little thrill of discovery spotted two snakes cuddled up next to each other: one young brown snake and one young garter:

Here's that garter looking sharp:
Here's the brown.
These photos offer a nice opportunity to compare these closely related species. The garter is a generalist. It tends to stick around water, where it hunts frogs, tadpoles, and small fish, but it also goes after worms and slugs, and will eat almost anything else it can swallow whole. When I was a kid I kept a large female garter who routinely ate adult mice. The garter snake has a very general sort of snake head, not particularly adapted to an aquatic life (for which other snakes have nostrils and eyes towards the tops of the head), neither to digging (no scales adapted to moving dirt, as in the pine and bull snakes (Pituophis species) - all pretty average. The brown snake, by contrast, has a little head compared to its body girth. Its soft, invertebrate prey smoosh down to fit, so it faces no need to work its jaws around any wide, bony vertebrates. It also has a relatively blunt snout. This is an adaptation to eating snails that you see in other unrelated snail-eating snakes around the world. That slightly squared off shape gives them some leverage to pry the snails out of their shells.

After a couple minutes of photos and ogling, I put the board back and released the snakes - an important order of operations, so that you don't crush the snakes with the weight of the cover object. I hopped on my bike and rode home - I had more work to do, but the two snakes were enough to get me over, along with the musk I could still smell on my hand.



One last note about snake musk - all snakes have musk glands; this is one of the few characteristics that all snakes share, along with lacking ears and eyelids and a few other more arcane anatomical features (many primitive snakes such as boas and pythons do have vestigial hind legs, so we can't use leglessness as a unifying characteristic). The musk glands are in the base of the tail, opening at the vent. Scared snakes will often poop on you, as you can see in the above photos, but they will also often musk as well, which is the smell that sticks with you even after you wash your hands. Some snakes' musk is more powerful than others' (next time you pick up a water snake - Nerodia species - you'll smell what I mean), and species tend to have distinctly scented musk - nothing smells quite like a king snake (Lampropeltis getula), though it probably takes a few years of getting musked on before you notice the differences. No matter what, it's the smell of success :-)