So the Lowe's in West Philly (the one off 52nd St. just north of Lancaster Ave.) opens at 9am on Sundays. Two Sundays ago we didn't know that, so when I headed out for more paint for our new apartment at around 8:30am, I found it closed.

I suppose I could have sat in the car and listened to the radio, but I was just a stone's throw from the West Parkside Industrial Park, from which that shopping center had been carved, so I moseyed on over on Jefferson to look around.

Near the shopping center they have an artificial drainage pond meant to ease the flow of runoff into the storm sewers - always nice to see - and across the street from the pond I found a few piles of concrete chunks and other assorted trash.

It was wet and cloudy, so I wasn't expecting much, but I found two little brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) under the first chunk I flipped.



They were all I found, and again I found nothing a couple blocks up Jefferson where they bulldozed my beloved brown snake hibernaculum, but it was still nice to see snakes on such a spur-of-the-moment little trip.

Nothing I've experienced is so much like flying as floating down the river facing down. I study the rocks scrolling along beneath me framed by my mask and, if I've chosen my course well, I only occasionally have to swerve to avoid a snag or double back to check the downstream sides of boulders. The more I think about it, I might be as aquatic as I am terrestrial. I feel at home in water, completely unafraid of the current or the 71 degree-surrounding temperature efficiently leeching away my heat faster than I can generate it (in other words it's good I bring buddies to keep an eye on me). I don't so much care that I'm not seeing any turtles. Of course it's still a thrill when after an hour of going down the river (and then repeatedly swimming or wading back up - not as much fun) something that's not quite a rock passes beneath me and I have to put on the brakes and dive.

All these photos of common map turtles (Graptemys geographica) are Eitan's from our Labor Day trip to the Delaware north of Trenton.

First, here's the male I found.



Here are a couple shots of the female - one of her getting away in the middle of a photo session.


Here I am gazing lovingly at her.

Here they are together - the male on top. Notice the size difference? The official term is sexual dimorphism - the males are a lot smaller than the females, but they also have different heads: the male's is narrower for a lighter diet of small critters like minnows and insects; the girls have broad, crushing jaws for clams, mussels, and snails.

I'll end with a shot of Jen in the river. I hope it captures some of the peace of the setting. I don't care what people say about the Delaware; it's a beautiful river and a divine place to spend an afternoon turtling.

I've been wondering about map turtles (Graptemys geographica) in the Schuylkill for a little while now. In a way that is stupid; they've been documented as far up as Valley Forge, but I've still wondered if they're just out in a couple little spots or if they're as widespread as they are in the Delaware.

Map turtles are not quite native here. They live quite naturally in the Susquehanna River system, but apparently weren't living in the Delaware system until the middle of the 20th century. I assume they've spread up the Schuylkill from the Delaware (they've been documented at the Heinz NWR near the meeting of the two rivers), but that would be hard to say for sure.

Red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) are certainly not native. These hardy, attractive turtles are from the Mississippi river system but their popularity as a cheap, throw-away pet (you know those itty-bitty green turtles with the red stripe on the head you see at street fairs?) has spread them all over the world, the Delaware Valley included.

You can see a lot of them from the Falls Bridge over the Schuylkill (just upstream of where I waded in and grabbed one a few weeks ago - see below), and on Sunday (Sept. 6th) Scott, Miles, and I stood on the bridge with binoculars, watching lots of sliders bask and swim, trying to pick out a map turtle. Scott won the contest, and as we passed the binoculars back and forth we confirmed that one of those turtles was not like the other. It had an indented rear edge of its shell, a lighter shell color, and a different pattern of yellow lines on its head. It was way too far out for a decent photo, but on my way home I rode over the bridge and got a shot of both species basking together. The big turtle is the slider, but there are two smaller turtles with proportionally smaller heads right in front of it on the log, both map turtles.

Hello Delaware Valley Herp fans! The summer break is over, and the Delaware Valley Herpetological Society is kicking back into action with a public meeting on September 25th at 8pm.

The speaker will be our own Scott McWilliams, or rather Scott McWilliams, MD. I might have mentioned on this blog that Scott's a doctor, specifically an emergency medicine specialist. He will be speaking about venomous snake bite, so this will be a great opportunity to learn more about the natural history of venom, the public health aspects of bites (who gets bitten by what, how often, and why), and of course the best ways to treat venomous snake bite.

We'll be back in Marple for this meeting. See below for the details:

Marple Township Building, Springfield and Sproul Roads

From the East or West: PA Rte 3 (West Chester Pike) to PA 320 (Sproul Road), South to the "T". Enter parking lot just past police station or turn left on Sproul and take your next left to get to the other parking lot (on the right).

From the North or South: Either take I-476 (Blue Route) to Exit 9 (Broomall) and go west on PA Rte 3, then south on PA rte 320 or take PA Rte 320 from wherever you are.

There is a parking lot around the Township/Library Building and one just to the east of the building. Street parking is possible on Sproul Road from the Police Station north.

Refreshments will be served. While there is no admission charge, there will be a voluntary collection to cover the speaker's fee and other expenses.

I have decided to promote the lowly musk turtle, a.k.a. stinkpot (Sternotherus oderatus) to box turtle status. From now on a stinkpot can make a trip. Rarer herps can of course do the same. Find nothing but a timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus)? Cool. Spent five hours in mud and briars, and only came up with a spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata)? That's a day well spent. Box turtles have long been the relatively common herp that can ex post facto justify leaving the house for several hours, burning lots of gasoline, paying tolls to cross the Delaware River, and yes, even road cruising.

As much as I don't like road cruising in New Jersey, followers of this blog will notice that I end up out there once or twice a year. This year we were taking along Mike, a herper we met through the Delaware Valley Herpetological Society, for a general cruise with low expectations.

Mike was eager to see Fowler's toads (Bufo fowleri), a new species for him but probably the most reliable critter on NJ sand roads at night. If the temperature is above 70 degrees, you'll see one. If it rains, you'll have trouble driving more than a few yards without running over a toad.

Temps stayed above 70 degrees long enough to see a dozen or so toads, this one pretty representative:


Mike's mission was thus accomplished, but Fowler's toads, however cute and endearing as they squat high off the pavement on their front legs and hop with suicidally poor timing towards your tires as you drive past, don't quite do it for me.

This adorable stinkpot, however, justified the whole trip for me. Stinkpots are pretty active at dusk and apparently just after nightfall, since we are often able to spot them tromping around in the shallows of Pine Barrens ponds and lakes. Scott spotted this one, hollering at me from a few yards away on the shore - I had worn sneakers I didn't mind getting soaked, he hadn't.

We drove home happy.

We humans, experienced only in the relatively straightforward progression of mammalian reproduction, assume a direct sex - fertilization - pregnancy - birth, all of it taking a neat nine months or so.

Timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) take the long view on reproduction, however. Late summer tends to be the time for romance, with males occasionally fighting it out (by wrestling, not biting) to win the heart of a female in heat. Then it's time to crawl up alongside her, rup her neck, and, if she's game, finally seal the deal. From that point the rattler sperm don't fertilize any eggs waiting inside the female; the eggs aren't ready yet. The sperm hang out inside the female all winter until she ovulates in the spring, and then her pregnancy really begins, only to end with birth in the late summer or early fall.

By now we've decided that the females we've been observing on Forbidden Ridge are pregnant (or gravid, to use the technically correct term). Pregnant human women tend to eat, sleep, and generally work just as they do the rest of the time, if a little more laboriously as they reach the end, but rattlers tend to take the whole summer off. The gravid old girls find a nice sunny spot on the side of the mountain and soak up the sun. They don't eat, they don't hunt, they just hang out and bask. If that seems implausible to you, keep in mind they only do this no more than every three years in our area (maybe every two in warmer parts). The only explanation we can think of for a group of rattlers not doing anything all summer but just sitting around and basking is that they're pregnant, and now Scott and I are hoping to catch the end of the whole process - babies!

Well, we didn't see any babies on the 18th - too early, we figure. We were also a little late up the mountain that day; it was sunny and hot, and although we saw seven or eight in the shade, only one snake was out in the open. But check out how fat she is.

I guess we have to make another trip.

The herping season is slipping away, just like it does every year. I guess everyone is affected by different signs that summer is not eternal and that fall is coming in a few short weeks. For me the first baby brown (Storeria dekayi) and garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) of the year gave me a startle. Already?




I was up in the cemetery on one of my routine brown snake canvassing trips when I found this three-inch little tyke, probably no more than a few weeks old.

Here's a typical female (although missing much of her tail), maybe even the mom?:

I had a good time with (not on) one of the mattresses in the cemetery:

Right when I was getting ready to flip it, a cop drove up. He asked what I was doing, and I reported that I was looking for snakes. I think showed him the photos on my camera of the snakes I'd been catching, and along with the salamander shirt I was wearing demonstrated that I was simply a geek out for a good time.

Once I got around to flipping the mattress, I found three snakes beneath it, including an adult and a baby garter:

A board gave up another baby garter, a lot bigger and more vigorous than the meek baby brown snake:

I bought my poncho at the beginning of 2000 as gear for the Inca Trail. You could fit a camel under it; it's a huge backpacking poncho that snaps up in the back, and I don't think I've been using it enough lately.

Rain should never keep us from herping, especially in the middle of the summer. I've had to remind myself of that, though. My new little obsession of turtle snorkeling is only possible in relatively dry conditions. The rain itself isn't the problem, rather it's all runoff washing silt into the river and stirring up the sediment on the bottom. I'm learning that even rain upstream - like way upstream in New York - can stir up sediment and raise turbidity too much to be able to see map turtles (Graptemys geographica) on the bottom.

So last weekend (August 9th) when I looked out on a solidly rainy morning, I saw my snorkeling plans washing away. Fortunately box turtles (Terrepene carolina) are actually relatively easy to find in the rain, so I switched the snorkel and mask for my poncho and sneakers and headed into the woods. I chose a favorite old tract of woods in New Jersey - sort of edge of the Pine Barrens - and after only about a half hour came across this pretty girl at the edge of a clearing:

After I briefly checked her out to confirm she was a she, I stood back and watched her tromp along the edge of a puddle.

Unfortunately that was the only turtle I saw. The rain stopped, and I stopped to stare a few minutes over a creek running through the woods. Everything green is greener after rain...


...and a beautiful, ethereal haze hung over the water in a flooded section of woods nearby.

On my way out a fawn popped out of a meadow and, staring right at me, took a few steps forward. I'm not sure what she was thinking; do I look like a doe? Apparently not at closer range, since the little guy turned and bounded into the woods after a few moments of consideration.

Some people go shopping when they're upset and need to feel better. Some people binge on ice cream or chocolate, others on alcohol. I like to catch a few critters to make myself feel better.

On Monday, on my way home from work to catch an important phone call from a potential funder of the PB&J Campaign (my other big hobby), my beloved bicycle started riding really strangely. The rear wheel was catching some kind of new friction, and it was shifting back and forth in a very strange way that made me stop and pull up on the sidewalk for an emergency inspection. It took me a minute of checking the usual suspects for mid-ride bike problems, but finally I saw that part of the frame had broken near where the rear wheel attaches. I could still ride it, but with the image of the other side cracking and the wheel falling off on the Walnut Street Bridge, I rode and coasted very, very slowly home, the whole time hoping and praying I'd make it home in time for the call.

I made it home in time, and the call went pretty well, but I was still feeling kind of stressed out by the experience and genuinely distraught about the bike. I have grown attached to the old girl over the past three years. She's an old Raleigh Technium road bike that the guys at Firehouse Bicyles had rehabbed and converted into a short-handlebarred zippy little machine perfect for riding around Philadelphia. On Tuesday they told me that they could weld her back together again, but Monday evening I needed to make myself feel better.

First, I got the car from Jen (still at work) and I went for a swim at the Kelly Pool, site of the confrontation two weekends ago that drove me to turtling - see last week's post. There I swam for a half hour, and then hopped in the car to catch brown snakes and garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis).

Here are some of the little guys and gals that cheered me up that evening:

That last girl is actually one I'd seen before a month ago, in the exact same spot.

Scott recently raised the possibility that the population of brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) in the Mt. Moriah Cemetery might be infinite. Of course that statement is not what it seems at face value; there are certainly a finite number of snakes living there right now, but over the time which we have to study them they might practically be beyond counting.

The principle of a mark-recapture study is somehow marking snakes so you can tell them from the others and so that you know you caught it in the past. As you continue catching snakes, the ratio of previously-captured snakes to new snakes can give you a sense of how large the overall population is. If there are very few snakes in the population you are sampling, let's say 50 for the sake of the discussion, and you catch ten each time you visit, then after a few visits you would have marked a large proportion of the snakes, and there would be a strong probability of catching previously-marked snakes in the ten you catch each time. If there are a lot of snakes, say 1,000, then those ten snakes per trip don't add up to a large proportion of the overall population, and you'd expect to re-capture fewer. There are a lot of assumptions and conditions in there, but that's the basic idea - the more snakes you recapture out of the snakes you find each time, the smaller the population.

Now I haven't gone to the cemetery as often as I perhaps should have this summer, but I've marked about forty-five snakes there so far. I've recaptured about three (including the one from Monday). I'd like to keep working at this for a couple more years so I've sampled the same places in the same seasons, but when I mentioned my really low recapture rate to Scott, he replied with a question: how long do brown snakes live? (The answer is complicated and I can find little information in the literature about brown snake longevity; in captivity they can probably live for more than ten years, but in the wild most babies are eaten or freeze before maturity, and I would bet that adults don't often live more than five or six years before they're eaten by something.)

I think I called Scott some nasty name, since he was basically pointing out the possible futility of my effort. If it takes me a few years to mark enough snakes to recapture enough to make an estimate of the population size, then the snakes I've marked earlier might tend to die off naturally at a high enough rate to make it impossible for me to mark a meaningful/useful proportion of the population.

Snorkeling in the Delaware has got me thinking about snorkeling in the Schuylkill. Most Philadelphians will shudder at the thought of letting the murky waters of the river that separates West Philly from the rest of the city come in contact with their skin, but water quality is an empirical matter. It is testable and quantifiable, and, based on such monitoring, our fair Schuylkill is objectively cleaner than most of us think. Some people even go swimming in the Schuylkill, so I figure snorkeling should be no big thing.

This morning, after an unpleasant interaction with Philadelphia City Recreation Department employees at a pool where I had intended to go swimming (not relevant, except that I felt pissed off and needed a herping fix), I rode up MLK Drive to the Falls Bridge to check below for turtles.

I had seen red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) basking down there before, and this time I saw some more turtles - one of which was surely a slider, and a few of which just might have been map turtles (Graptemys geographica). Maybe that's wishful thinking, but I think worth an empirical test of my own sometime in the future.

On my way back home, I decided to check out a rocky area around the railroad bridges just downstream from the Roosevelt Boulevard bridge. I saw a small, juvenile turtle basking that dove, but a bigger turtle just sat there in a rocky shallow spot right next to a pileon by the bank. So I waded over and picked her up. (please excuse the slightly crappy phone camera shot)


This turtle gave me the impression of being really old. She also smelled kind of funky - I'm wondering if she was under the weather, explaining her complacency as I approached to pick her up.

I guess I should be upset about her being an invasive species (we should be having red-bellies - Pseudemys rubriventris - basking down there), but it worked as a herping fix and made me feel less pissed off about the crappy customer service Philadelphians have to deal with from our public servants (I write that as a federal public servant who takes customer service seriously - enough ranting). Stay tuned for more Schuylkill turtling!

I do not keep a life list. I don't track which species I haven't found and then specifically seek them out (this is common among birders and, to a lesser extent, herpers). I usually say mean things about life listers, but this time I'll refrain from casting stones; I get plenty nutty in my own ways (ask me about my quest to find milksnakes - Lampropeltis triangulum - in Philadelphia).

Still, even without an official list I have felt the absence of wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) in my herping life. These are an iconic species of the Northeast, particularly in rocky streams in wooded hills and mountains - my favorite landscapes, and it's been a little strange that I have never seen any in all my wanderings.

Scott has been more broken up about this than I have. Scott LOVES wood turtles. He has a childish dedication to the species, spontaneously reciting "did you know" facts about them and expressing amazement at interesting behaviors, such as pounding on the ground to bring earthworms to the surface. He has consoled me for a few years now about my failure to find wood turtles, so he was delighted when Eitan and I emailed him with this beautiful find:


That photo is Eitan's. We were up near Forbidden Ridge (site of mind-blowing timber rattle snakes - Crotalus horridus) at a trash site Eitan had found, and on my way to a board in high grass near a seep, I looked to my left and saw a wood turtle just sitting there.

Here are my more utilitarian voucher shots:


She really was a fabulous turtle. I wanted to play it super cool, like it was no big thing, but I can see why Scott gets so excited about wood turtles, and I can imagine targeting them more in the future.

Note the orange goo on the turtle's face. Like box turtles (Terrepene carolina) you often find (rather Scott often finds) wood turtles as or just after they've been eating worms, snails, and slugs - all slimy meals that are hard for a turtle to clean up after.

I should note that Eitan not only took a beautiful shot of that turtle, but that it took him 25 minutes. The turtle alternated between staying clammed up and then sprinting away, so Eitan expended a lot of patience to catch her just standing there. Scott, of course, knew all about this and later had some good recommendations for how to deal with wood turtle sprinting.

We also found some dusky salamanders under rocks in a seep - they look kind of like common duskies (Desmognathus fuscus) but the round, not-keeled tail is a characteristic of mountain duskies (D. ochrophaeus).

And now, almost as an afterthought (sorry), the rattlers. We found a heap of them back at the main spot on Forbidden Ridge. We assume these are gravid females, known to hang out together in particularly exposed areas, and indeed some of them were notably plump towards the rear.

Here are a few down in a crack later in the morning once it had heated up a little:

We found sheds at a couple spots where earlier we had seen live snakes. We destroyed the sheds, the better to hide the snakes from passers by who might kill them.

Here's a nice snake catching only a little bit of sun in partial shade.

Quick follow up to the last post: On Sunday (July 12th) Scott and I tried another trip to catch map turtles (Graptemys geographica). Unfortunately some heavy rain the night before had washed a whole lot of silt into the river, making it impossible to see the bottom and thus impossible to properly hunt map turtles.

We did see an assortment of turtles in the Canal: one stinkpot (Sternotherus oderatus), one snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina), and a few smaller map turtles.

We did find another hatchling - maybe the same one.



I decided to take a photo of one of several test holes. These are holes that nesting female turtles dig but for whatever reason do not end up using for egg laying.



Last quick photo, here's a norther watersnake (Nerodia sipedon) we saw. The poor thing was swimming hard against the current and barely making any progress at all.


Post script: Eitan took a swing by the Delaware River recently and got some good photos of the map turtles. Here a close-up shot of one basking:

Here are a bunch basking on rocks - our targets in snorkeling:

The story of basking turtles usually goes something like this: You see turtles basking, and maybe you can identify what they are, but before you can get close they all jump in the water. That's the end of your interaction with them. Maybe you can watch them with their heads peeking out of the water, watching you, but that's about it.

A few years ago I learned about a way to keep after those turtles, a way to actually catch them even after they've jumped into the water. It's ridiculously simple - you just jump in the water and grab them. Of course it helps to have a mask and a snorkel, but apparently turtles are pretty easy to grab once they've dived off their basking perches since they often just park themselves on the bottom or around snags and root masses by the shore.

This year's round of aquatic turtling began with me announcing on Field Herp Forum that I was going to hit the Delaware on Friday (July 10th) and inviting anyone who wanted to come with me. Most of the time I'm secretive (borderline paranoid) about my herping intentions and locations, but this time I felt like I could relax. Map turtles (Graptemys geographica) are likely not native to the Delaware (although they are native to the Susquehanna system in Central PA), and their presence there is well known; I'm not giving away any secrets, and I don't care if people catch the turtles and take them home.

Only one other herper offered to join me - Marc, who goes by Pinhead on the forum, and we started early in the morning 7am, which in retrospect might have been too early; the sun was barely high enough to warm any turtles trying to bask. The first couple spots we had been advised to check out did not have any turtles we could see, but I did see a beaver swim by. (Yet again I thought to myself, "Wow, beavers are a lot bigger than I think they are," and then it dove with a thunderous splash that scared the crap out of me.) We're stubborn herpers and the morning was young, however, so we went to our third spot.

We walked to the water and, in a pretty casual, non-revelatory way, I spotted two map turtles basking on the exposed roots of a fallen tree. This is a tough photo, but you can kind of see them on roots emerging steeply from the water towards the bottom-right of the mass of roots.


Map turtles are notoriously wary turtles; almost as soon as you can tell what they are they dive into the water, and these two jumped before I could get close. But that was okay; it was consistent with our plans. I waded into the water (chilly but bearable), and after a couple minutes of walking slowly and studying the rocks on the bottom I found one of our turtles.

Here he is hanging out of his shell a little:

Here's a shot of him from above, showing why they call them "map" turtles - the wavy network of orange/pink lines on the green background:

Here we are posing with our find, first me and then Marc:



We congratulated ourselves, and then decided to move on to another spot. We waded around for a little while, but Marc spotted a bunch of basking map turtles directly across the river. They're not in this shot, but it gives you an idea of how wide the river is:


I thought about wading across, and I actually started, but about a quarter of the way out it occurred to me how long it would take me to get there, and with the push of the water growing stronger the deeper it got, I made the wise choice to turn around and work on how to approach them from the other side.

That would prove harder than we initially thought. We had no trouble driving down to the nearest bridge and across, but we weren't sure where to park. The opposite bank is the Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park, basically a long walking/biking path along a canal. The problem was that there wasn't a way to get from the road across the canal.

We tried one possible pull-off, but we found no way across. However Marc did glance down and notice there in the weeds this old girl digging a nest.

We felt a little bad interrupting her at all, so we got some quick photos in and moved on.

Ultimately we figured on parking relatively far up the road and canal and walking the way back down the path to where we needed to jump in to access the turtles - ultimately about a mile and half up the canal.

We started at the mouth of a small creek flowing out into the Delaware. Marc almost instantly spotted a hatchling map turtle - a really adorable little creature.


I then set off downstream, figuring I'd get as close as possible to the adults basking about a hundred yards away. When they dove, I'd dive too and try to spot them on the bottom.

Of all the ways to move across the surface of the planet, this might be my favorite - drifting and paddling in fresh water, not swimming as much as adjusting my position in the current to get around boulders. It's a lot like dream flying, with the rocks and boulders scrolling by beneath me and a light, agile sensation as the water carries me along.

I was aiming downstream still, but watching the bottom when something that was obviously not a rock appeared on the bottom below me. It was a map turtle! I put my foot down to stop (I was in about four feet of water) and turn, and picked the big girl off the bottom.

Marc was wondering what the hell I was doing breaking off my course downstream, but I popped out of the water and held the squirming turtle up in the air like a trophy.

Post Script - we realized at that point that neither one of us had brought a camera downstream to actually take photos of the turtle ("I thought you had one." "Oh, I thought you had one."). Next time we'll have something to show for it.