On Sunday October 26th, the day after my birthday and way later in the year than I ever thought would be worth herping, a sunny day brought me back out. I was incredibly tired, having stayed up late the night before watching the Phillies win game three of the World Series at nearly two in the morning (Carlos Ruiz is the man - why the Rays loaded the bases for someone who was, at that point, the only Philly hitting the ball reliably, I'll never understand, but I'm delighted they did it), but I hopped in the car and drove out to Upper Roxborough to the spot where earlier Scott had found a road jerky milksnake (Lampropeltis triangulum). I poked around and scoped out a stone wall where I'll bet you they're hibernating, but I didn't see any.

I ran into a nearby homeowner, and I asked her about milksnakes. In this case I didn't even have to knock on her door (she was outside giving the business to a guy riding up and down the street on a loud ATV), but never be too timid to do this. Asking someone to herp on their property is a bigger deal, but I have yet to find someone who wouldn't tell me what kind of snakes they see in their back yard. Even in Philly, a notoriously unfriendly city, people open right up to talk about the little baby garters they see in the garden (usually those are brown snakes - Storeria dekayi). As for this homeowner, I'd been hoping for an answer like, "oh, they're right over there," but unfortunately this particular homeowner hadn't seen any milksnakes - just garters (Thamnophis sirtalis).

When I recounted this story to Scott, he pointed out how many different kinds of snakes lay people assume are garter snakes, but I had described milksnakes in a lot of detail and I'm pretty sure they hadn't seen any. Let this also be a lesson in the secretive habits of milksnakes. We know they live (and die) half a block away from that house, but the neighbors had no idea.

I took off for another area to herp for milksnakes, but had no luck there either - just a few redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) and this American toad (Bufo americanus). I guess I should hype this toad - all I've been posting lately have been brown snakes and redbacks, and it was a genuine pleasure to see this toad, with its beefy forearms, hopping across the newly fallen leaves on the forest floor.




I decided to wrap things up at the Mt. Moriah Cemetery, where I found one beat-up adult male brown snake. It now occurs to me that this is a really crappy photo to show off an interesting critter, but I'd like you to note a couple things - first, dig that big scar towards the base of its tail. It had several more scars on its belly and back down its tail. You never know exactly what scars are from, but I figure this brown snake was lucky to get away from something, and it then recovered from some really ugly wounds.


Also note the pattern on the back - the little bars connecting some of the dots. These bars are within the usual range of variation for our brown snakes (the northern subspecies), but if you connected a few more of the dots, you'd have the pattern of the subspecies from the South and Midwest - the Midlands brown snake, or Storeria dekayi wrightorum)

[From the end of September into October I've racked up a backlog of herping trips/posts. With the barren heart of winter still to come, I'll keep posting these fall trips and look forward to posting some of the posts about my travels once I run out.]

I'm a little worried these brown snake (Storeria dekayi) posts are getting repetitive, but I'm still having a good time with them. The later in the season this brown snake thing goes, the more fun it gets, since the end of October isn't supposed to yield much. October 25th is my birthday, and usually it's a chilly day, when I wish my birthday were sometime in April or May.

The weather on my 32nd birthday was windy and wet. Even with the high of 65 or so, it didn't look great for much besides salamanders. Still, when we ran by the Mill Creek Farm for some veggies, I couldn't resist flipping a few pieces of cover. The first snake I turned up was a baby, a Young of the Year (YOY) as we like to say. I had no equipment with me, so I just took note of where I'd found it and let it go. I tried another piece of cover, and this time found an adult female. She was pretty calm, and Jen shrugged when I asked if we could take her home to mark her, my thinking to bring her back on Wednesday. Here she is in our temporary holding container (she's now set up in a small cage for her four day stay at our place):



With my luck at Mill Creek, I figured why not try the cemetery. Here's another view of the overgrown graveyard, downright spooky with low, spitting clouds and a hard, whistling wind blowing leaves around.



I found one little redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus - what else is new) but I also found this little YOY brown snake. It was too small to mark (or I just lack the nerve to take a cautery to such a tiny snake), but I was able to measure it, and it's always nice to find another snake this late in the season.

I guess the season ain't over till it's over. That sounds a little hokey, kind of like the herping maxim "the snakes are where you find them," but it didn't get above the low 50s today (windy too) on October 22nd, and I still found two brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) in the Mt. Moriah cemetery in the late afternoon.



The redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) were less of a surprise - they're basically out all winter if the ground isn't frozen.


More important than the 'don't give up' idea here is the importance of locating hibernacula - where critters spend the winter. I do this by paying attention to where the snakes are in the early spring and late summer and reading the landscape (features, like walls, exposed to a lot of sun) for likely dens.

Snakes generally don't go into a true hibernation like some mammals such as woodchucks - sleeping straight through no matter what - rather they tend to take advantage of warm spells to come out and bask a bit. A professional herpetologist I know once found pine snakes basking at their den in a December warm spell, and I've found garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) and brown snakes at 'wrong' times of year. So, if we get a bright sunny week in the 50s in the middle of the winter, you know what I'll be doing.

I've wanted to eat lunch with timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) since my encounter in late August. The idea that these big, beautiful snakes just keep on doing what they're doing as long as I don't get too close just tickles me to no end, so much so that I've wanted to bring a lawn chair with me all the way up one of the right mountains to sit back and chill with them.

On Wednesday October 15th I checked that off my herping to-do list with Eitan. He had emailed me earlier in the week, and with a little finagling I was off work and we were driving up into the mountains. We checked out yet more rocky outcroppings (I think we covered at least eight miles that day) and then a familiar stretch of rock, but it took a little more searching to find the party.

I had followed Eitan up onto a new slab, when he stopped and announced that a big, beautiful yellow timber rattler was basking just on the other side, more or less where we were planning on stepping in another second or two.


We each took our "safety shots," as Eitan calls them, and then he crouched down to take some closer pictures.


I was happy with mine but afraid to step off the rock for fear of startling the snake. So, I started very carefully looking around us, since where there's one rattler... there's another basking fifteen feet away!


Picking out cryptic snakes in a sun-dappled background takes a kind of methodical discipline I usually lack. You have to look around and give your eyes a minute to let shadows or charred stumps resolve into coiled snakes. Usually whatever I'm staring out stays a stump or a pile of leaves (and then there's this pain-in-the-ass black lichen that curls off the rock and looks just like a coil), but every now and then it turns into a beautiful black timber rattler.


And then it happened again. This time I was staring into the shadow of a tree, and again it turned into a snake.


That's about when we declared it a fine time to eat lunch and pulled out our sandwiches. The snakes just sat there doing what they were doing while I munched on my PB&J and we discussed just how awesome timber rattlesnakes actually are.

With lunch over, I circled around to get a picture of the snake behind the tree. What a spectacular snake. I have no idea why it was sitting out in the open and not in the sun, but we were happy to stare at it a bit longer.


We had one more rattler to find, this one through no dedicated or highly focused landscape examination. I simply put my hand down on a waist-high slab of rock with a boulder on top of it and noticed a snake in a crack three feet away. See it?


I walked around for a better look.


We didn't just see timbers on this trip. I know that it will sound horribly ungrateful to complain about seeing only timber rattlesnakes on these trips, but I have been confused by the lack of smaller snakes this fall, when my tried-and-true method of flipping rocks along trails hasn't produced the usual ringnecks (Diadophis punctatus) and garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis). I was genuinely thrilled to see a garter snake in a patch of sun next to the trail. Here's the little guy.

And last, and maybe kind of least, here's a wood frog (Rana sylvatica) that neither of us saw until Eitan accidentally kicked it in the grass.


And here it is hopping away.

I haven't posted enough about my black ratsnake (Pantherophis obsoleta) obsession, or, depending how I look at it, it's best that I don't post about my black ratsnake obsession.

I didn't start the season (back in March?) with a black ratsnake obsession. They were one of my favorite species to find, indeed probably tops on my list, but I could count on seeing at least a few (two in 2006, four in 2007) in a year's worth of slogging around wetlands and lowland forest and hiking through the mountains of PA. Their ubiquity gave me a false sense of reliability - they live in all the habitats I herp - upland, lowland, the edges of wetlands, farmland tree lines, and remote mountain ridges. A snake that I have a chance to see on every trip outside the city should show itself to me at least once, but that's not what's happened.

Other people have suffered black ratsnake droughts - Eitan most famously in my herping circle, and a herper from the DC area who posts frequently on Field Herp Forum recently posted that he broke a four year spell. Even the great Kauffeld wrote about a ratsnake drought in Snakes and Snake Hunting.

As the season has progressed, I've grown more frustrated and focused on black ratsnakes to an emotionally unhealthy degree. What makes this especially infuriating is that it's very difficult to focus on finding black ratsnakes. They're not predictable in the same way as spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata) or rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus), species that, if you know where they live, will almost always be out at specific times of the year under specific weather conditions. I know several black ratsnake spots, but however often I've visited them this year, I've come up empty-handed. Black ratsnakes frequently cohabit with timber rattlers, for example, and I've spent a lot of time with rattlers this fall, but nary a ratsnake have I seen.

I tried to break my dry spell with a trip to the mountains on the 13th. This was a longer drive than I usually do for a day trip, but I wanted to return to where I'd seen the gravid timber on August 23rd (see my August 27th post). I got in one hell of a hike - about five solid hours of hiking almost directly up a ridge and then scrambling around a line of short cliff faces and boulders.

I should note the spectacular views from the top. I hardly ever post gorgeous vistas like this (this will be no exception), with a valley spread out below me, a patchwork of deep reds, bright yellow, and blazing orange. Basically I'm afraid someone will recognize the landscape and deduce the locale, even when I suspect, as in this case, that it's a place that none of my fellow herpers have visited. You'll have to use your imagination, I guess, but the point I'd like to get across is how surprised I was at how beautiful it was - I don't go out herping for the views, however predictably gorgeous they'll be from the top of the rocky ridge lines I work for rattlers. In addition my eyes are usually on the rocks at my feet, not at the view behind me, so when I turn around and see a view that belongs on a postcard, I'm always surprised and delighted that it's been there behind me the whole time.

However successful the hike was, I ended the day disappointed. I only saw one snake, and then just barely. I had scrambled to the top of yet another rocky shelf sticking out of the mountainside, and as I made it up to my feet I heard a slow sliding noise, that steady rustling of dead leaves that gives away a moving snake. I jerked my head around to look and saw a thin black tail disappearing under a boulder. There was no rattle on that tail, which leaves two possibilities: black racer (Coluber constrictor) or black ratsnake. Now in my notes I've recorded this as a mystery snake (my term for an unidentified snake, kind of like the mystery turtles that dive before I get a good look at them or the mystery frogs that you hear jumping in the water before you know they're there), but I'm leaning towards ratsnake. That wooded, rocky terrain doesn't strike me as racer habitat (I could be wrong, but I associate them more with flat, open woods or overgrown fields), and the snake was not escaping like a racer. Racers tend to zip away in dramatic fashion, kind of like a guy in a sports car showing off. This snake was sliding away slowly, gracefully getting out of sight before I noticed it was there, and of course it succeeded in doing just that.

I'm not counting this as a success. It certainly doesn't feel satisfying; I didn't get to handle the snake (my favorite part of finding ratsnakes) or see it rear back in that ascending zig-zag that ratsnakes use to look tough. I'm obsessed as I was before, and of course now I'm facing the long winter - four and a half hard months of guaranteed ratsnake-less frustration.

I guess a lot of people would find standard herping disgusting. After all I'm hunting what for other people are "creepy crawlies," and they often share space under rocks with centipedes and spiders, ants and flatworms. I spend hours thigh-deep in marsh muck stinking of sulfurous dekay and have snakes spray me with feces and foul-smelling musk.

Yet urban herping presents its own uniquely disgusting hurdles. I don't find so many used condoms out in the woods, but in the Mt. Moriah Cemetery they're almost as common as the red-backed salamanders (Plethodon cinereus).


Also disgusting is discarded clothing. That might not sound so gross on the face of it, but why would you discard clothing in a cemetery frequented by prostitutes and used by homeless people for a camp site? I'll let your imagination race with that one.

On the afternoon of 12th of October (sunny, mid-70s) I came back to Mt. Moriah and my favorite wall there to look for more brown snakes, but I didn't spot any out and sunning themselves as had Eitan and Shoshanna the week before.

The one piece of artificial cover there is an old pair of work pants, moldy and stiff from seasons exposed to the elements, home, I suppose, to a thriving micro- and macro-biological community, kind of like an artificial reef. Using as little of my finger as possible, I lifted up the pants (so stiff they were more like a piece of particle board than fabric) and saw three brown snakes. I grabbed two of them and stuck them in a plastic container, but the third disappeared INTO the pants.

What a quandary that presented. There was a snake in there, but I sure as hell didn't want to reach my hand in there. As gingerly as possible, I lifted the pants by the waist and peered inside. I saw a coil of a snake balanced on a stiff fold of fabric, within reach but again nowhere I wanted to stick my hand.

So, I shook the pants out, expecting the snake to fall out so I could easily grab it from the ground without the unsettling contact with foul cemetery pants.

That little guy hit the ground, but it was not alone. Three others made the short fall too! That's right, I shook four total snakes out of an ill pair of stiff, moldy, crusty old pants. Here they are in the temporary holding container, waiting to be marked and released.


The extra fun part was that two of them were re-captures from the week before.

I'll leave you with a picture of a lead-backed phase red-backed salamander, in the process of wriggling out of my hand. I found these in the cemetery, and again along Cobbs Creek as I searched for earthworms - I had to turn over a lot of cover for two measly nightcrawlers, but had no trouble turning up a half dozen salamanders.

I keep saying ‘this trip to the mountains will be my last one this year,’ and each time I prove myself wrong. Last week I was hurting for some timber rattlers again; it’s now very much like an addiction – not just the snakes but the whole experience of leaving the city, hiking out over rocky trails through the woods, and hopping from boulder to boulder in search of the rough, heavy beasts. Even now I look out the window at the blue sky and know there are probably thousands of rattlers basking in picturesque locales all across PA.

So, I planned a trip Sunday (October 5th), and pretty soon Scott, Simon, Eitan, and Eitan's wife Karyn were coming along as well. In a replay of the week before, the clouds were thick and low in the sky, but there were enough gaps of blue to convince us that it was worth hanging around. After some initial scouting, Eitan and Karyn went for a walk, and the remaining three of us poked around a bit and then stretched out on a cold boulder to chat and stare at the sky. It's hard to watch; the sun pokes through, but you see a swath of gray sweeping towards it, and you then try to find the back edge of the blanket of cloud (hard to call it just a 'cloud' when it's covering one quarter of the sky) and look beyond it for more blue.

After an hour of that the sun gained the upper hand. We now soaked up some rays ourselves even as we felt the rock sucking the heat out through our backs. We debated at what point the rocks would be warm enough to encourage the snakes to climb out onto them, but then I put my hand out on some leaf litter and found it warm to the touch.

That observation was enough to get us up on our feet and looking. We didn't have to look far; Scott peeked in between some stacked slabs maybe ten feet away and called out, "I've got one!"

Simon and I scrambled around behind him and pulled out our cameras. You can see it here peeking out into the sun, enjoying the rays, and making up its mind whether to come all the way out.

I called Eitan on his cell phone to let him know, and they started back. We fanned out to keep checking around boulders and sunny patches of leaf litter, finding no more timbers but feeling energized by the pretty black snake Scott had found.

Soon Eitan called back, I assumed to try to locate us, but instead he was reporting their own great luck: Karyn had spotted a copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix)! See it basking so delicately sheltered by the oak leaf and the rock, soaking up that little patch of sun in between?

This last photo is Eitan's:

This is my first PA copperhead, and Scott's as well (come to think of it, it might have been the first PA copperhead for everyone there). I've seen them before in Ohio and in Georgia, and the others had seen scads of them down South, where they're one of the most common snakes you find crossing the road at night. In Pennsylvania they're pretty widespread across the bottom two thirds of the state, ranging through the rolling hills of Chester County, for example, but also found denning up with rattlers and black ratsnakes (Pantherophis obsoleta) on rocky mountainsides.

The hard part about copperheads for me is how darn cute they are; I want to just reach out and pick them up when I see them. Of course that would be stupid. Their bite is generally not deadly, but it's strong enough to land me in the hospital and maybe permanently ruin a finger or two.

After our photo session with the copperhead, we led Eitan and Karen back to the rattler. By then it had curled itself up in a comfortable basking pose.

Eitan and Karyn had to make it to a play that evening, so they headed back to their car before we did. They called on their way back to the car to report another timber, and they were kind enough to mark the trail where they'd seen it so we could find it on our way out. We took a couple hours - we checked out some other likely den sites, and that took a LOT of hiking and scrambling around. By the time we made it to where they'd seen the snake, we needed the pick-me-up.

Here it is, back in a defensive pose.

Interestingly it was far from any plausible den site, at least a quarter mile by my estimation. I think it might still have been on its way back home, but there's always a chance of another den that I haven't found yet. I prefer the latter; it means there's yet more out there to explore.

Last thing, another hiker had introduced me to teaberries the week before. You can see them around the second rattler above, but here's a closeup:

They're not quite as fun as blueberries or cherries, but they have a refreshing minty/cinnamon taste, and I enjoyed munching on them as we hiked.

How are brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) different than timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus)? Go ahead and start listing all the ways, but one of the most important from the perspective of someone searching for both is in basking behavior.

The timbers with which I’m now pathetically smitten spend a lot of time sitting outside in plain view of the whole world, soaking up the sun and quietly asserting themselves to any predator that might make a bad decision. True, humans take advantage of their public basking to massacre them, and maybe there are eagles somewhere that will pluck a full grown rattler from atop its favorite boulder, but in general the timber rattler has little to fear in the forest around it, little reason to hide itself while it’s trying to absorb some of sun’s gift of warmth.

Brown snakes, by contrast, are afraid of everything. A big spider is a threat, as are shrews and everything else on up the food chain. I have heard of a brown snake being found in a meadow, coiled in a tiny patch of sun penetrating the thick grass above it. I’ve only come across one in the open, and it seemed to be crossing a path at dusk. More typical is for a brown snake to warm up under something that does it the favor of passing along heat while simultaneously keeping it out of sight of all the scary beasts that could gobble it up in a heartbeat, like robins.

Last weekend I took Eitan and his daughter Shoshanna to Mt. Moriah cemetery to show them some urban herping. We turned up a bunch of redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) under trash, and then I showed them where I think the brown snakes are hibernating. It's a retaining wall around an elevated plot, exposed to the sun. Just like last year I fretted over how the spot has no cover (no rocks, logs, bark, trash) under which to find the snakes, so I couldn’t actually access them in their den.


Last year Jen found one solitary log to look under and found two neonates. This time I was still frowning when Eitan reflexively stooped and grabbed at something about three feet to my left. He came up with three brown adult brown snakes, and my jaw dropped open. They were just sitting there on a patch of bare earth, basking exactly where I knew they weren’t supposed to be. A moment later Shoshanna shouted that she had found one as well, this one sitting on a stone step maybe ten yards away. Here's a shed from one of the steps:




I felt thoroughly stupid, my expert complaint proven wrong by two beginners at catching brown snakes in cemeteries.



Earlier that day I’d had about the opposite experience. Vivianne and a group of boys with whom she volunteers walked with me to the Mill Creek Farm, where I was sure I could turn up some snakes. Each time we go out they talk about how they’d love to catch snakes, especially anacondas or pythons (it can’t hurt to dream), but the places I’m most likely to find brown snakes are where I’m least comfortable taking a group of boys – vacant lots and cemeteries full of broken glass and boards with rusty nails that could punch right through an unwary foot. The brown snakes of the Mill Creek Farm made a fool out of me there too, this time by staying no where we could find them. I think I made up for the failure by taking them back to our apartment to see the turtles and snakes; even if my ratsnakes aren’t pythons, they still make for nice showpieces.

Fall is a bittersweet season for herpers. The summer doldrums break with the drop in temperatures that shifts reptile and amphibian activity back towards the surface and into daytime hours. Critters, after a summer of eating, reverse their spring migrations, now trekking back to their dens for the long winter hibernation. It’s wonderful to be able to find snakes again under surface cover or to see them crawling around in broad daylight again, but that hibernation part is the killer – we know the fun lasts only a few, hurried weeks, time to run around wondering if each glimpse of scaly beauty will be the last.

The arithmetic of months and weeks consumes more and more idle thought – two more weeks to mid-October and frosts in the mountains, then four more months to reliable herping again when the spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum) and wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) move, with a possible break in a month and a half if this could possibly be the year I actually find breeding tiger salamanders (Ambystoma tigrinum).

This urgency pushed me into the mountains on Monday (September 29). I had had plans to go herping with Eitan on Sunday, but the weather took a turn for the cold and wet, no good for sun-loving timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus). On Monday I had to pick up my grandmother and her sister (Aunt Florence to me) at quarter-of-six to go to dinner at my parents’ house for Rosh Hashanah, but that left enough time for the dash north or northeast (sorry to be vague again, but such is life in a world with poachers) to a den site Eitan and I enjoyed (putting it mildly) this spring. Work has been light, so I called my boss Sunday night and got the day off.

The clouds were sending me mixed signals when I parked and started the hike to the spot a little before nine in the morning. The ceiling was gray and low in the sky, more damp flannel then fluffy cotton. With temps in the low 60s at that point, no respectable snake (I was targeting timbers, rat snakes – Pantherophis obsoleta, and copperheads – Agkistrodon contortrix) would be sitting out in the open. I did flip rocks here and there for what I think were simple dusky salamanders (Desmognathus fuscus), and I saw a newt (Nopthalmus viridiscens) swim away in a small pool of water. I also turned up some redbacks (Plethodon cinereus). I mentioned last week that these are a sign of fall, and luckily I’m not yet tired of them. They sure are cute – an impression that I try to suppress since I think that they’re a lot more graceful and beautifully colored than we give them credit for most of the time. Take a look.




When I reached the vicinity of the den site, the clouds were still all wrong. A few teaser patches of blue let the sun through to warm my skin for a second, but they were quickly whisked away by the wind that seemed to favor the dense, cool clouds. I looked around for the particular pile of boulders that had been the hot spot in May, and I was surprised by how hard it was to find it. Thank God for GPS units.

I had planned to photograph snakes at the den and then hike off to check out more possible dens, but with the skies as they were, I decided to wait an hour. I laid back on an inclined slab and rested, watching the clouds float by and finally eating my PB&J for lunch.

At noon I gave up. If the weather was going to suck like that, at least I could get in some hiking. I hopped and hacked my way back to the main trail and started moving. Of course then the clouds finally blew away and the sun came out. I stopped to flip rocks that looked like they might be hiding smaller snakes but found only ants and crickets. I took a step towards this particular rock and leaned over to pick it up, but then took a startled, lurching jump back. See it? Focus on the dark spot in the leaves a little to the left of the rock.

I had found my first rattler, a smallish adult coiled in the sun in the leaves. Here are a bunch more pictures – you can tell I really liked this snake.

It sat still for me, and I really thought it wasn’t going to move at all, until I noticed that it had moved its head around to directly face me. You can see the shift in the next two photos:

I eventually tore myself away and headed on up the trail. I was suddenly having a great time, but I still had to pick up my grandmother and great aunt at 5:45pm. Given the time it would take me to drive home (allowing time for possible tie-ups on the Schuylkill Expressway), shower, and drive to their place, I needed to be at my car by 2pm. I checked the time again and realized, much (very much) to my chagrin that I needed to turn back.

I passed that rattler again, and unfortunately the motion of me passing by a second time was enough to get it crawling on its way.

I cut off onto a different trail and started hiking about as fast as possible on rocky, uneven ground. I covered a lot of that ridgeline in about fifteen minutes and was nearing our favorite den when “BUZZ!!!!!!” I jumped back and shouted something like, “Holy $#@$&*% God!” because before me, hastily pulled back into a defensive posture, was a really big yellow rattler, and she was rattling her big, black, velvety tail off. She (I don’t know the sex for sure, but I’ll guess female for the sake of avoiding “it”) wasn’t running, though, so I took out my camera and started taking pictures. After about thirty seconds she stopped rattling, and then for another thirty she sat still, just ten feet in front of me to the right of the path.

When she moved again, it was towards me. She extended her head, and then followed that to straighten out into a line and glide across the path at an angle that took her four feet away from my boots and down the slope to the other side. I really wasn’t expecting that; I’d been thinking she’d turn the other way and run, or at least take a little detour around me, but apparently she had somewhere to go, and as long as I was keeping still, I wasn’t a big enough threat to force her one foot off her original path.

Do you have any idea how strange that is? Snakes see humans and if they think they’ve been spotted, they get the hell away – all our reactions to the snakes we find are based on that fundamental rule. If we see a snake, we grab it so we can observe it before it flees. If we don’t grab it, we hope it’s betting on camouflage and we take pictures as we hold our breath, rushing because we know that at any second, that snake is going to hightail it into the bushes. The timber rattlers are different, and this blows my mind. They have their personal space, and if you stand quietly outside that personal space, they don’t really care.

This confident beast of a snake glided along with what looked like the absolute minimum of effort – not whipping around like a scared snake, but sliding over the leaves as if gravity was pulling her along even when she was going up over a slight rise in the hillside.

Also important is that she was heading away from the den that I know and towards where I suspect more dens to be – nice news for me, and I hope I can get back there again before it’s too cold to see where she might have ended up.

I saw no more snakes after that, but I did see a few little American toads (Bufo americanus). These guys are probably some of this year’s toadlets, which would mean they’ve more than doubled their size since they grew legs and hopped out of the water.

I did make it back to the car in record hiking time and picked up my grandmother and her sister on time. Have a Happy and Healthy New Year, and may it be full of big rattlesnakes.

PS – I submitted the rattlers’ information on the PA Herpetological Atlas Project website. If you see rattlers or anything else on their list, please make sure to submit the data too. This information is building a database on sensitive species so we can better understand how well they’re doing and spot declines before it’s too late. NJ has a similar project.

I was back out at the Mill Creek Farm this afternoon (September 24th). I only found one brown snake (Storeria dekayi), and it was L14R0, the one whose photo is at the end of the September 10th post. Of course I was trying to find and mark more snakes, making the single snake a bit of a letdown, but it was really cool to find a snake I could recognize like that. Instead of another anonymous brown snake, this is now one that I can follow around throughout the year as it moves around (or doesn't move) its habitat.

On Sunday (September 21st) Jen and I took a morning copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix)trip. The weather was great (70s, sunny), the location was perfect - rocky wooded hillside, the snakes previously observed by the landowners, but we saw nothing. I'm a little bummed about that, but Jen did uncover a handful of redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus). Of course falling temperatures, the crisp air, and leaves turning colors are all signs of autumn, but so are redback salamanders. They tend to stay deep underground in hot, dry weather, but as it cools down they come to the surface, and soon we'll be finding them under every log and rock in the Delaware Valley. I hope they're enough to get us through the winter.