I’ve been going jogging in the Woodlands Cemetery for a couple years now, and I hadn’t found any snakes there until last week. Now I’ve found two. Both were under the same board, though on different weekends. I’ve checked this board probably twenty times. Has it just now decided it likes me?

The deer that hang out in the Woodlands are suspicious of me, I think. They jump up and run away when I get too close and then stand no less than thirty yards off watching me with their tails up in the air as I pass them. The squirrels, including the charcoal-gray melanistic one, don’t seem to pay much attention to me, and the robins also go about their business like I’m not there.

The plot of land the cemetery occupies dates back to the 1700s when it was an estate way out in the country. In the mid 1800s it was converted to a cemetery so people could get buried out in the country, but, by that point in the development of our transportation system, close enough for their families to visit. For a while it was quite a fashionable place to spend eternity. Several wealthy Philadelphians of the 19th century are there, as is Thomas Eakins, the famous painter.

Unlike its counterpart on the other side of West Philadelphia, the Mount Moriah Cemetery, the Woodlands is well cared for. There are no trash piles or fields overgrown with grass and weeds, and most of the graves have their headstones on straight.

Of course there is less for me to look under, so I have only looked while already there for walking or jogging.

It was quite a victory to find that first snake, a northern brown snake (Storeria d. dekayi), under that one board in the cemetery. It proved my suspicions correct. There are snakes in the Woodlands, dammit, even if they took me two years to find. I tried the board this Saturday morning, and this time it produced a hefty garter snake (Thamnophis s. sirtalis), which was a total surprise. The Schuylkill is not very far, I guess, but I was still shocked, since there is no water in sight, and garter snakes generally hang out where they can hunt frogs, fish, and tadpoles. I find them near the Wissahickon, along Cobbs Creek, at Tinicum – all near water.

This garter snake was a really chunky girl, and though she was dusky, when she puffed up she showed the most beautiful interstitial (between the scales) skin – marked with that bright, light green-blue that seems almost lit from within.

Of course I did not have my camera for either find. I have yet to come up with a comfortable way to go jogging with my camera.


I did have a camera for some more brown snakes from the vacant post-industrial lots up near 49th and Parkside.

I found several more brown snakes on a couple trips there on June 17th and June 22nd. On the 17th I headed over before a brunch date. I decided to check out some slightly smaller neighboring lots.

First I looked under some cover at the corner, and I found one under the very first rock.


















It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t all that big, but I always get a kick out of finding something under the first rock I try.















I wandered back past this equipment parked in a blocked-off street.

















I have no idea what these are, but maybe they have something to do with the commercial buildings that are supposed to go up at 52nd and Jefferson.

I found no herps back here, but I did see some blackbirds.
















I also saw some orange ribbons in a couple of the lots, so I figure they’re slated for construction. I plan to go back and maybe relocate some snakes if I find them.















I checked some cans I had missed at that same corner. My sister had just called me to say Jen and I had an hour and a half to meet her in South Philly for brunch, but I had to get in just a few more pieces of cover before I got on my bike again.

I found two brown snakes under one of those cans. I only caught one of them.
















Right before I found those two snakes I had a pleasant interaction with the police. They had driven by me a few minutes before, and on their way back the other direction, the cruiser stopped and the window went down. I was worried I’d be cited for some kind of trespassing or something, but the officer in the passenger seat simply asked, “Are you catching bugs or something? We were just curious.” I said no and then explained herping. She gave me that blank nod that showed she was trying to be nice even though she thought I was nuts, she said goodbye, and she drove away.

Jen and I went back on the evening of June 23rd so I could take some more photos of the area and look for some earthworms while we were at it. We found no worms, but I did get this shot of rebar sticking out of the berm, just in case we forgot what is under all the grass and weeds.





















We also found three snakes: one very standard-looking gravid brown snake,

















one dusky little guy under an old piece of rug (no photo), and one absolutely magnificent beauty, near bursting with developing babies and colored in chestnut on the sides and lighter taupe down the back.

Of course I didn’t get a good picture of the gorgeous one. I tried, but she wouldn’t sit still, and the light was fading. Here are two pictures. The first is my favorite. It is totally out of focus, but it gives the sense that she’s really zooming off that rock, her front half accelerating into hyperspeed.
















Totals:

June 17th, from 9am to 10am, sunny and in the low 70s.

3 brown snakes

June 18th at 9:15am, sunny, humid, and 75 degrees.

1 brown snake

June 23rd 8pm to 8:30pm, dusk, very humid and high 70s.

3 brown snakes

June 24th, at 10am raining lightly and in the low 70s.

1 garter snake

Mount Moriah Cemetery is split down the middle by Cobbs Creek Parkway. On June 4th I posted about a snake we found on the east side, but the west side has always looked more promising to me. Of course the flip side of that observation is that the west side of Mt. Moriah Cemetery is in much worse shape than the east.

The east side’s plots are mostly grown over with grass, and these cemetery meadows do not look entirely inappropriate. The taller headstones are shrouded by the grass and are visible by only their top few inches until you draw close. From a few feet away the grass works like a curtain, and the marker stands alone. It’s not the effect the now-deceased or their family anticipated when they chose the plot, but at least it’s dignified.
















The west side has a few meadow sections, but too many are dominated by the bigger weeds. Small trees of heaven jut out from behind and between headstones, knocking them off their bases another centimeter each year. Some plots are invisible under young sassafras and vines. Obelisks are consumed by rose bushes that once decorated their feet. Even the open areas look like savannah, the headstones almost incidental.

















Jen found our first two brown snakes (Storeria dekayi dekayi) in the west section of the cemetery under a board alongside a path that runs through a thicket of Japanese knotweed.
















Japanese knotweed is a horribly invasive exotic plant that grows in surging walls of green that choke out everything else. We had found redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) under these same boards and the neighboring tire piles at the beginning of the winter, and the ground had looked nothing like this – just knocked-over canes and mud. On Sunday (June 11) I could see no indication that there were people buried back in there until I rounded the corner and saw the step up to the Wright plot.















The snakes were together under this board.



































This is the prettier one, though Jen claims to notice no major difference between the brown snakes I say are pretty and the ones that I think are dull.
















Here’s the third snake, one that I found (Jen’s really been outclassing me lately) under a log in this meadow-plot on the other side of the cemetery. Click on the picture and admire this little gem.


















See how the black spots sharply define the edge of that smooth, pale gray back against the rougher, browner flanks? There’s something really beautiful in that subtle contrast, right?

Their rear ends’ plumpness is beyond dispute, even if you deny that some are more beautiful than the others. Here’s one of the first two in Jen’s hand.
















I’m pretty sure we’re mostly finding gravid (pregnant) females. I’m curious if we’ll find many in another month or so when they’ll all have dropped their litters.

By the way (see the comment below), the Mount Moriah Cemetery has a website at which you can learn more about its history: http://mountmoriahcemetery.org/

The weather Sunday evening was partly cloudy and the temperature falling through the high to mid 60s.

Totals:

3 brown snakes

Seeing a box turtle (Terrepene carolina) crossing a busy road is like watching a four year old juggle knives. “You could get yourself killed!” I want to yell. I wish I could to do something to drill into that tiny turtle brain just how dangerous it is to step onto the asphalt, but turtles are stupid. If they’ve got what seems to them a good reason to make it to the other side of the road, they’ll try to cross it. It’s up to us to help them across safely.

At some level they understand that they have no business being on blacktop. I’ve never seen a box turtle walking down the street, or even crossing at an angle; they almost always seem to go straight across, taking the shortest path possible. They don’t take their time. They get their heads out in front and walk pretty quickly.

Of course pretty quickly for box turtles is pretty slow. That’s the problem: they’re box turtles. Even fast little mammals get run over by cars – chipmunks, squirrels, and cats and dogs – and all these animals can run really fast when scared. A scared box turtle doesn’t run; it just pulls in its legs and head and hides.

The first turtle I found on Saturday (June 10) morning in eastern Cumberland County was crossing the end of a very quiet exurban street, and the old girl was moving at all possible box turtle speed. I doubt she was in much danger, but after I had taken my photos I dropped her on the side of the road she had been heading for.

Here she is from the car:
















I walked around her for a closer shot with better lighting:














She wouldn’t come out for her close-up, but she still looked pretty cute.
















That blue mark there on her left is not natural. It looks like she’s involved in a study in which each turtle gets a unique pattern of marks on its shell. I let the NJ Herp Atlas folks know about her, and I figure they’ll notify whoever’s doing research down there.

The second turtle I found was on a busier road, and he was almost all the way across when I spotted him. He had apparently been spooked, and had everything pulled in except the tip of his nose. The nose disappeared too when I got close.





































I was out road cruising – my first time. The idea behind road cruising is to cover as much ground as possible to find the animals when they happen to be crossing the road. This sounds ridiculous, I know, but apparently it’s one of the best ways to find snakes in the Pine Barrens. It’s also really popular out West and in Florida.

I gave road cruising a shot on Saturday, and I’ll try it again this summer in the evening when rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) and ratsnakes (Elaphe obsoleta) should be up and moving, but I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy driving, no matter the purpose; I’d rather be hiking around looking for critters than slouched in the driver’s seat listening to the radio and watching the road.

Some people go road cruising on their bicycles. They take mountain bikes and deck them out with three hundred dollar lighting systems. I’m all for that – you burn a lot more calories that way and save on gasoline.

However I need to be able to afford another bike (my current bike is a road bike) and the lights, so I’m about six hundred dollars away from cruising the sand roads of the Barrens on anything but the car.

Before I hopped on the AC Expressway for home, I stopped by a dump site in western Atlantic County. Other herpers frequent the site, as was clear from these carefully arranged boards that had been heaped in a disorganized pile my last time out there.
















Kyle calls these “racer boards,” and sure enough, the third one hid this black beauty (Coluber constrictor constrictor).






























We both froze while I decided what to do. I could take some pictures first or I could grab for the racer. I really like en situ shots, certainly more than shots of squirmy, biting racers at arms length, so I snapped two quick photos and then reached. By the time my hand was anywhere near it, the snake was off. I didn’t dive for it, so those two pictures were all I got.

A lot of people who herp New Jersey think little of black racers. They’re common, hard to catch (there’s a reason they call them racers), and bite hard when you catch them.

I like racers. I recognize their faults, but I don’t think there are many snakes more beautiful than a coal-black racer with that white chin.

I'll end with the turkeys. I saw a lot of them, which I find interesting because they were re-introduced to New Jersey a few decades ago after being wiped out.














The temperature rose from the high 50s to the mid 60s while I was out Saturday morning. It was partly cloudy.

Totals:

2 box turtles
1 northern black racer

We kept finding cute little northern brown snakes (Storeria d. dekayi) this weekend (June 3rd and 4th).

Jen flipped the first one Saturday under a board in the Mount Moriah cemetery, a large and depressingly run-down graveyard on either side of Cobbs Creek Parkway a couple minutes south of Baltimore Ave.

We had been collecting earthworms for my ringneck snakes along the Creek, and once we had as many as we needed, Jen suggested the walk in the cemetery. It was getting towards dusk, and the clouds left over from the day’s rain were painted a spectrum of sublime pinks and oranges. I love cemeteries for walking or jogging - wide open green spaces with no traffic and majestic old trees.

We had gone for walks a couple times in the section of the cemetery on the west side of the parkway (and had found a few redback salamanders – Plethodon cinereus), but this was our first exploration of the east section.

The walking was lovely for the first twenty minutes or so, but there wasn’t very much to look under, so the herping was pretty subdued. The east section of the cemetery had a lot less trash dumped in the overgrown plots than the west side. This is, of course, a good thing – dumping trash in a cemetery is about as sleazy as it gets – but it made for less artificial cover for herps to hide under.















Jen had walked a little ahead of me; I think it was while I was frowning at some broken headstones. She knelt down to turn something over and then shouted. I came trotting, and when I reached her she picked the board back up to reveal a brown snake.
















This one had a reddish cast to it, and I think it might have been getting ready to shed. More interesting, though, was its tail, which ended in a healed-over stump. It seems to have barely escaped from something a while ago.
















I have been studying the Google Earth satellite map of Philadelphia, and I headed for some promising green patches along the Schuylkill in Southwest Philly on Sunday.

I rode my bike down Woodland Ave. and then Lindburg Ave. to 63rd St. My plan was to head north, trying each numbered street to the east. The area at the end of 63rd St. looked great from outer space, but when I got there I found a gate. Google Earth can show you the ground to a resolution of a few feet, but that’s still too indistinct to make out chain link or barbwire.

I tried 61st St. and had better luck in the vacant industrial lot at its end. I locked my bike to a twisted heap of metal in the middle of the lot and started turning over trash with my cultivator. There was a lot to flip, but it only took me about five minutes to uncover this little girl.
















The next lot I tried was too thick with waist-high weeds to see the ground, and I didn’t see much trash, so I gave up and hit the road again.

I really, really, really wanted to check out another lot north of there along Eastwick, but it was next to several blocks of decrepit rowhouses. I felt exposed, and I’m still a little afraid of looking under trash where I could imagine someone keeping his stash. I worry some teenage dealer with a gun will ask me what the hell I'm doing and then shoot me when I try to explain that I'm looking for snakes. Which sounds more likely, looking for snakes in a vacant lot or looking for his heroin?

I found another good, overgrown lot, this time well shielded from view by some warehouses, but there was a tow truck parked next to it with the passenger door open and the truck audibly idling. I don’t know why someone would jump out of a running towtruck into an overgrown vacant lot (a herper would have shut off the motor), but I didn’t want to find out, so I checked out Bartram’s Garden.

To the credit of the staff there, there was no debris or trash to look under, and I found nothing under logs or rocks. I did have a lovely time walking around, though. Finding snakes is a lot of fun, but flipping rotting boards, rusty car parts, and other trash can be a little disgusting after a while. Strolling around a clean meadow and well-tended gardens left a sweeter taste in my mouth for the last short leg home.

Totals:

1 brown snake each day

Ah, the smell of snake musk in the morning! It’s the smell of success, and there’s no better way to start the day.

I’ve been striking out a lot lately. Maybe striking out is not the right baseball metaphor – I’ve been finding a few easy-to-find herps, so maybe I’m hitting foul balls a lot lately, but on Memorial Day, instead of driving an hour to the Pine Barrens or an hour and a half up into the hills and then wasting my time in 90 degree weather, I turned my attention back to West Philly.
Back in early March I posted about scouting out a vacant, overgrown industrial lot near 49th St., a block south of Fairmont Park West and north of the railroad tracks. Here's the satellite shot from Google Earth.

















A nearby lot is slated for development into a strip mall featuring a Lowe’s, so I had contemplated a rescue mission there. The idea had been to catch as many brown snakes as I could at that lot before it’s all blacktop and retail and release them somewhere safer.

The lot that will soon be the hardware store is all fenced off, however, so I had checked the largest of the lots that aren’t fenced off. There might not be a need for rescue mission here, but it looked like great northern brown snake (Storeria dekayi dekayi) habitat, and I’ve been really interested in finding more of these little snakes. They're the only snakes that thrive in row-house-urban Philadelphia.

















I'm not sure how long this lot has been vacant, but it's apparently been untended long enough for this tree of heaven (an invasive exotic) to grow up through a tire.





















It’s a lot of fun to stumble into herp finds, but I get a far deeper satisfaction out of scouting out good habitat, waiting for ideal weather, and finding my intended quarry there. Today, I found three brown snakes on that overgrown field of weeds, scrubby bushes and trees, collapsed walls, and trash. They musked their little tails off on me, but I was ecstatic.

I tried once before earlier this spring and found nothing in spite of what seemed like pretty good weather (maybe too dry). Today I hopped over the berm that runs around the edge of the lot, and found two brown snakes under the third or fourth piece of cover I tried: this old wooden beam.




































The two snakes looked pretty similar, but one had darker spots, while the other had a duller look to her. I tried some posed picture on top of the beam. They came out a little over-exposed, but at least the snakes held still. The temperature helped. The weather was sunny and in the upper 60s, the day just heating up, and the snakes were cool to the touch.































Both looked a little plump towards the rear. I did not sex them, but I’m willing to bet they’re gravid.

I tried more cover and found nothing but the usual ants, termites, centipedes, and whatnot. I steered clear of the horse grazing in the middle of the lot, and after about forty-five minutes, I headed back to my bicycle.

There are some concrete chunks at the top of the berm at the edge of the mowed section near the sidewalk. I was standing by my bicycle when I had a feeling about one of those chunks.















I walked back up to the chunk, lifted, and yippee! This one was the prettiest, in my opinion, with a slightly grayer shade down the back.

















After my brown snake triumph, I rode my bike over to Cobbs Creek to see if I couldn’t round out the morning with a garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis). I had no such luck, but I immediately heard the deep bellows of bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) calling from the creek, and I went down to look. There were four calling in a row from the shallows, about ten to fifteen feet apart from each other. I was a little surprised at how close they were to each other – they call to stake out territory and attract females, and I figured they would want more space.

Here are the four in the shallows. Can you spot them all?
















Here are some close-ups.



















Only one seemed to be paying attention to his neighbor.

















No one was paying attention to the duck.
















I walked around the west side of the creek and hunted for worms. I was impressed to find a leadback redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus) under a log. It was already in the 70s, and it’s getting late in the season to find redbacks. I was also surprised by the location. I think of redbacks in that area as living on and around rock outcroppings that make for good retreats in hot or freezing weather. This one was living on the floodplain with nothing uphill but houses and asphalt.



Totals:

3 brown snakes
4 bullfrogs
1 redback salamander