This is part two of the North Carolina herping vacation. Once again, all photos are by Josh Shatsky or Scott McWilliams

We spent the second part of our North Carolina trip down the coast a little, in and around the Croatan National Forest. In my pre-trip scouting online and flipping through detailed range maps, I had noted this area as a possible destination, and Eitan had mentioned it as well when we called for help back in a moment of desperation in the Lake Phelps area.

We needed the change, as much as for our sanity as for our herping. Nothing wears you down like four days of boring, crappy luck on what is supposed to be an exciting adventure, and we at least needed to feel like we were trying something to change our luck, even if it was just a change of scenery.

The drive down involved one unexpected ferry crossing, as well as a bag of boiled peanuts and some monster peaches I could have confused for canteloupes. I didn't take any shots of the peanuts (I forget how salty those are) or the peaches, but here's one of the ferry.



Soon we were there, but "there" was a fuzzy concept, a few hundred square miles we didn't know particularly well, with any spot on the map you could plant your figure as likely to yield success as any other.

The landscape was boring at first glance. There was some marshy pocosin there in the Croatan (a really fun word to say "Crow-a-tan"), but the landscape was dominated by flat pine woods. These might be productive to hike in the spring, but not so in the late summer, so right then we were looking for more-promising features - bodies of water, abandoned, dilapidated structures, dump sites, etc. We were lucky to have some more of those handy drainage canals everywhere alongside the roads, and we saw a handful of wide lakes on the map too. We also saw a few marshy creeks that looked like fun:



I would like to be able to compare the herping in the Croatan to the Lake Phelps area two peninsulas up the coast, but the weather was quite different in a very important way: a tropical storm was coming. Hannah was a horrible disaster for Haiti, and I confess some guilt at hoping she would sweep our way. We didn't exactly need a storm of natural-disaster proportions, we just needed a lot of rain, but a tropical storm would do the trick.

Heavy rains can simply flood critters out of their burrows, pushing them out onto the roads at night and closer to the surface during the day. All that water also makes it easier for moisture-loving amphibians to leave the water and hop around. While we do like frogs, we also like the critters that eat them - various water snakes (Nerodia species), cottonmouths (Agkistrodon piscivorus), kingsnakes (Lampropeltis getula) and other fun snakes, including some really large and brightly colored snakes called mud snakes (Farancia abacura) that Josh was itching to get his hands on. These mud snakes are unfortunately difficult to find, since they spend almost all their time in the water and mud, and rarely go onto dry land, except for during rainstorms. (They also can be found in cover at the edge of the water - soggy carpet is supposedly perfect - and we checked every semi-submerged object we could find). Water turtles also sometimes get up and leave the water to walk around in the rain, which all together means we were imagining some really cool things happening once the sky opened up.

We made it to the Croatan in the afternoon. The air was humid as the northern edge of the storm system slid in over us, a promising sign. We checked into a hotel, caught a little rest, and then headed back out into the dusk. We navigated with the paper Delorme atlas, supported by Josh's driving-GPS unit (we named her Audrey), and I took us down a few blacktop and dirt roads that extended into the national forest and adjoining state game lands - I'll note that both are categories of public land much friendlier to the herper than the National Wildlife Refuges.

Our luck was nearly instant. We were driving near some houses that must have backed up against the forest when we saw a chunky little snake making its way across the pavement, its held up in a high angle off the road.


I do like copperheads, although when you start playing with them (even if it's only for a couple photos and then to scoot them off the road) they sometimes get a little snappy, striking so hard they jump a little.

We quickly found another one, and suddenly felt pretty good about ourselves.



Soon our driving took us to one of those large lakes in the middle of the forest. Here's a dusk shot from the following day:


With not much better to do we hopped out of the car and started shining our flashlights around. This can sometimes produce rough green snakes (Opheodrys aestivus) and other critters sleeping in the bushes, not that I've ever had that luck. Josh, however, struck gold almost right away, or rather he struck white and black - a nice kingsnake he found that was itself inspecting the bushes around the edge of the lake.



We drove around a bit more and found ourselves in what in the dark appeared to be an overgrown field with several decrepit houses. We flagged it for inspection in the morning, but on the way out nearly ran over another kingsnake, this little gem.



The next morning we slept in a bit and then headed right back out to where we'd found the small kingsnake at the end of the night. By daylight the site was more than we'd even imagined in the dark. There were three decrepit buildings still standing but with boards and other debris scattered around them, and one shack totally collapsed, its tin roof spilled out into the high grass. To be really emphatic about this, for the non-herpers out there, this is a scene straight out of our dreams - not much gets our blood pumping like decrepit buildings in a agricultural/forest patchwork setting with lots of boards and roofing tin for critters to hide under.

We got to work first on one of the standing building's half-collapsed front porch. Josh caught some Southeastern five-lined skings (Eumeces inexpectatus).



Then Scott flipped and had to chase down something that eats little skinks, this black racer, who was not at all happy to be restrained and photographed.



And then there was that collapsed roof. We knew it LOOKED perfect, but how often do perfect cover objects reveal nothing beneath them but ants and centipedes? Still, we got our hopes up and then got in position. Josh and I lifted up on the main section while Scott crouched at the ready. The tin rose up, and Scott shot an arm out to grab at a snake slipping away deeper under the roof.

What he pulled out still makes me grin with excitement, the most beautiful eastern kingsnake I've seen. Her coloration and pattern were perfect: inky black with that white chain pattern, the lines bold but not too thick for my taste.

I think if she'd been thinner she would have seemed less remarkeable. I measured her at about five feet - really big but not enormous. What gave her such a regal, imposing air was her bulk, a shiny, supple length of solid muscle that made her look like she could eat just about anything she wanted to.



What made her even cooler was that she was extremely calm in the hand. I think she nipped at Scott when he first grabbed her, but then she quieted down and calmly explored whoever was holding her, and we each took turns to check her out and take photos like these.


It was hard to let her go again - I was powerfully tempted to take her home as a pet - but our better inclinations prevailed and we said goodbye.


I suppose we could have continued to search that particular area, but raindrops were starting to fall, and we were excited to head back out to where the more-aquatic critters might be hopping around.

The first critter we came across was this little lizard, not aquatic at all. No trip to the Carolinas would be complete without an anole (Anolis carolinensis):



I was riding in the back of the car at this point. This is usually considered an inferior herping position compared to the front when road cruising, but in the daytime it can work out pretty well, as you watch directly to the side for things not in the driver or front-passenger's field of vision.

Looking down into one of the drainage canals I thought I saw something and called out to stop. Scott complied and I jumped out. There in the rain-spattered canal was a thick, chunky-headed cottonmouth.

Scott tossed me a snake stick and ran around over a little dirt-road bridge and down the other bank. We made an effort of trying to fish the guy out, but it dove into the weeds at the bottom, and we weren't quite ready to start feeling around in the murky water for a venomous snake. We let him be.

A little while later we spotted this familiar site up ahead on the road, a box turtle (Terrepene carolina - yes, another animal named "carolina"):


We stopped for some photos and then let him go.
It looked like a nice spot, though, with a pretty canal, and we started poking around. I quickly spotted another cottonmouth (I don't know why I was seeing them and not the other guys, but I'll take whatever luck I can get), this one beautifully banded, even if it did hide its head for the photos.Scott and Josh tried to fish it out, but with the same results as with its cousin up the road.

I headed down the way we'd come, watching frog after frog leap away into the water before I could do much to catch it. In retrospect it's perfectly obvious to me that I should have put on the waders, grabbed my net, and started dredging for those infernal amphibians, but I didn't.

Instead I saw a white pickup truck drive up and roll down its window. This is sometimes the prelude to an unpleasant interaction with law enforecement, even if you're doing the most innocent herping imaginable. I braced myself.

"Hello, what are you doing?" asked the man in the cab (white, thin, in his late 60s or early 70s, dressed as a civilian). I explained that we were looking for snakes, to which he responded, "What are you planning on doing with those snakes?" I quickly assured him that we weren't collectors; we were just nerds out for a geeky good time and some photos, to which he answered, "Oh good. Sometimes people come out here and kill snakes, and we don't like that."

Music to my ears! We had found a friend, and our friend's name was Jack. Jack was a local retiree who spent a lot of time as a volunteer in the forest, cleaning up dump sites, running off poachers and other evil-doers, giving out informational brochures, and giving recommendations of places to go in the forest. We hit it off famously.

We parted ways with Jack (though we ran into him again later), and we found a few more critters before we went back to the hotel for a cat nap, including this baby banded watersnake (Nerodia fasciata).


We were expecting big things after our nap - big rain, big frogs, big snakes, and things started off okay. It was sprinkling (what we were sure was just the beginning of the night's precipitation), and we quickly turned up a green snake and a ribbon snake (Thamnophis sauritus).


We also found this adorable baby snapper (Chelydra serpentina):


But as darkness fell, the rain actually let up. Wasn't it supposed to be a tropical storm? Weren't we supposed to see rain increasing in intensity?

Well, we never got the downpour we'd been banking on, just a whole lot of wind. The storm had ended up cutting just inland from where we were, and for whatever stupid accident of the weather ended up raining very little where we had chosen to herp.

We did find a handful of critters, including this young cottonmouth (they really are pretty snakes):

...a grown-up banded watersnake:

...and a cute and snappy yearling greenish ratsnake (Pantherophis obsoleta - when it grows up it will be a kind of ugly greenish color with faint blotches and fuzzy black stripes, a mix between a yellow ratsnake and a black ratsnake):



The DOR canebrake rattler (Crotalus horridus) with which we ended the evening seemed to put the icing on our sour moods, and I can't say we were particularly happy for our ride home the next day.

On Saturday (Feb. 7th) Scott and I got around to doing something we've had planned for a while. I can't quite call it herping, since we weren't actually trying to find anything, but this is important stuff for high-level herping: laying boards.

We suffer through the winter up here in the Northeast (I have no sympathy for Southern herpers who complain about things "slowing down" in the winter) and we loathe every minute of it: about 161,000 minutes, by my calculations - 16 weeks x 7 days per week x 24 hours per day x 60 minutes per hour. Still, we shouldn't be spending all our time inside crying. Instead we should take our pent-up energy and do things that will allow us to maximize our herping once the world does thaw out again.

Number one is scouting, which I discussed on January 24th, but number two is laying boards. Anyone with at least a little herping experience knows the thrill of finding some really nice boards or sheets of roofing tin, and then finding some really exciting critters underneath. For the most part this is an unpredictable thrill, since we don't ourselves illegally dump debris on public land (right? right!), but if you have your own property or make arrangements with someone who owns some nice herping land, you can set up your own perfect board lines to check in the spring.

Board lines are a topic of much discussion in herping circles - what's the best material (boards vs. metal, carpet in some cases), what are the best arrangements (single layers vs. stacks) - and I won't go into all the possible board laying nuance here. For a good full discussion of board laying, check out Will Bird and "Kentucky" Phil Peak's Snake Hunting Guide. Even without thinking too much about it, some boards are better than no boards, so you should take this frozen time to get out there and improve your chances in the spring.

Once you start thinking about laying boards, you'll start paying a lot more attention to your neighbors' trash. Suddenly a stacked pile of carpet rolls make you think of the frogs that could be hiding under that carpet in just the right location. A dumpster full of plywood outside a house undergoing renovation isn't an eyesore anymore, it's a big chest full of gold at the end of the rainbow, if only you can figure out a way to transport it to where it can do some good.

Both Simon and Scott have been on the lookout for good boards lately, and together they put together the makings of a few board arrays. Scott and I picked up the boards early on Saturday morning (Simon was fighting a cold and decided not to come along) and drove out to some private land we were privileged to herp in 2008.

On the way there we passed a hardware store with a stack of plywood leaning on the side of the building. We asked if they had any plans for the boards (and in the process explained why we wanted it - always an interesting converation), but they had plans for the debris. Even though whatever they had planned had to be less cool than what we were thinking to do with the boards, we respected their rejection and didn't steal anything.

Once at the site I showed Scott a rocky upland area that reportedly hosts a copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix) den. I don't think we'd have had much luck even if we had tried to find any:

The landowner was doing some work on a building on the property, and although they had already burned most of the plywood when I checked in about our plans (I wanted to cry when I heard that), we were able to salvage some nice metal scrap pieces for our stack.

Ultimately we didn't get as many boards as we'd hoped to use, but I think we're off to a good start. Setting up good board lines is a long process. The boards have to sit long enough to settle in and look like part of the landscape, long enough to make it into critters' seasonal routines, and ideally long enough to attract prey species like mice and voles to nest underneath.

Here are some pictures of what we put out. First,, an upland site in an opening in the woods set conveniently between a corn field and marsh:





Next, a sunny spot at the edge of a field and the woods:

Sometime in early August Scott told me he'd have a week off in early September and that he'd like to take a herping road trip to the North Carolina.


I had never taken a herping vacation before. I know that sounds a little strange given how obsessed I am with herping, but Jen, a cooperative and skilled herper, still isn't quite enthusiastic enough to sign up for a whole vacation of nothing-but, and generally I've reserved days off for longer vacations as a couple (our 2007 trip to Mexico is an example) and family visit trips. Of course a lot of these have included some herping time, but never as the focus of the trip.

Early September isn't the best time to go herping anywhere - the fall mini-peak in reptile and amphibian activity starts towards the end of the month as all the babies hatch out (or metamorphosize), everyone starts traveling back to hibernation sites, and the temps cool down enough for critters to be active or close to the surface during the day.

Still, a week of herping in even sub-optimal weather beats almost anything else, and I signed on. Josh also had a week off, so he came down from New York as the third member on the trip. On a nice Sunday afternoon we hopped in Caroline's Rav 4 and drove down the coast, through the Delmarva Peninsula, over to the Virginia mainland, and then not too much farther down into North Carolina.

I'll be splitting the account of the trip into two posts on this blog - one covering the Lake Phelps area of North Carolina and the second on the Croatan area.

Lake Phelps and the Pocosin Lakes (To assign proper credit, I need to be clear that almost all the photos in this post were taken by Josh Shatsky and Scott McWilliams):

Perhaps the biggest problem with vacation herping is that you often don't know the terrain ahead of time. With any first trip to a place you spend about half the time learning your way around, and thus only half the time actually doing any quality herping. None of us were truly experts on herping the coastal areas of North Carolina, but Scott had been down to the Lake Phelps area more than once and had had some luck there, meaning that compared to other possibly destinations, we'd have have to spend less time learning our way around and more time herping.

What does the area look like? I admit I was a little surprised. Scott described it as a mix of wetlands and farmland with lots of nice canals and drainage ditches, but I was still expecting a lot of forest, in particular the flat pinewoods that are so characteristic of the Southern coastal plain.

In reality the 'natural' landscapes there were dominated by something called "pocosin," which can refer to something that looks like an overgrown field with shrubs and stubby trees that goes from soggy to flooded. You think you're looking at an overgrown pasture, but then you walk out in it and feel the water seeping into your socks. This pocosin (like a lot of wetlands) sometimes burns when it's dried out, and apparently these fires can burn deep in to the peaty soil, producing at least some of the lakes that are the biggest water features on the landscape - lakes with great names like Pungo and Mattamuskeet. Lake Phelps looks about the same, a wide, round, shallow lake, even if it sounds less exotic than the others. Here's a shot of Lake Pungo. Thrilling, ain't it?

Much of the lakes and the surrounding pocosin falls in a series of National Wildlife Refuges, which might sound nice for herping at first, but in practice meant that we got a chilly reception from some staff who must have thought we were there to poach, which then left us feeling pretty wary about walking around and searching for critters.

Our bread and butter method for the trip was road cruising, starting an hour or two before dusk and keeping at it until we were tired and resigned to finding nothing else but DORs. Road cruising isn't my favorite herping technique, but in hot, humid weather, when most herps are only active at night, it might be the best we've got.

Road cruising is often best with different types of habitat on either side of the road - the idea is that critters traveling from one area to another need to get across the road to do so (this is also why roads at the edge of wetlands can be such ecological disasters; we're taking advantage of an awful situation). Almost every road in that area of North Carolina runs along a deep drainage/irrigation canal, promising at least frogs, turtles, and aquatic snakes such as water snakes (Nerodia species) and cottonmouths (Agkistrodon piscivorus).

The road cruising wasn't terribly successful. As I mentioned above, early September isn't good herping time, although that can change if you get really lucky with a big rainstorm. We were praying for rain in a big way, but for the first few days of the trip our prayers went unanswered.

On our first morning we swung by a site where Scott had laid out some dumped boards on an earlier trip. As so often happens, someone had cleaned up the boards (one man's treasure is another man's trash), but we did find a couple pretty box turtles (Terrepene carolina) soaking in puddles at the edge of the site.

Box turtles are always a welcome find, but we didn't find a heck of a lot in the rest of our other daytime herping. I'll sum up the highlights:

Skinks (Eumeces species) were running around here and there, and got out of our way too fast for us under more than one board. Here is one up on a tree:

We saw a few of these familiar faces (Painted turtles - Chrysemys picta) crossing the road.
This guy looked really cute from the right angle...



...but when we flipped him over we saw that he was missing a quarter of his plastron. I shudder to think of what he survived:

On a little walk around Lake Pungow discovered something very interesting but a little disturbing, that my actions are actually controlled by a small gray tree frog (Hyla species - either chrysoscelis or versicolor - they're hard to tell apart) that rides around on my backpack.

The most depressing things we found during the day (and we found a lot of depressing DORs) were the dead canebrake rattlers (Crotalus horridus). These are more or less the Southern form of our our beloved timber rattlers, and we sure were hoping to find some of them alive, but all we saw were dead ones. One was getting devoured by vultures (which in retrospect would have been a really cool photo), but this one was really fresh late in the afternoon, its head and neck apparently having been run over but not the rest of it, but still retaining enough reflex to writhe around slowly and rattle a little when touched.

When we stopped to look at it, a man who lived across the street came over to ask what we were doing. We had a pleasant conversation, in which he swore that we could find oodles of them crossing the dirt roads in late afternoon at the National Wildlife Refuge next door. He also asked us if we wouldn't mind tossing the dead one out into one of the fields in the refuge. We agreed, and by the time we tossed it out into the field it had stopped moving completely.

We saw more than one dead black racer (the southern subspecies, so Coluber constrictor priapus - a snake with one of the funniest scientific names ever, named after what you might be giggling about). We found this live youngster crossing a road:

On another afternoon, getting out a little early before proper evening road cruising, we found possibly the coolest herp of the whole trip, a beautiful little baby hognose snake (Heterodon platyrhinos).



The little tyke put on the full hognose snake performance. For act one it flattened its head to look big and imposing:

For act two it flipped over and started writhing around as if in mortal agony:


Then for its final act, it held still in its belly-up position, working to convince us it was dead:

The action didn't exactly pick up at night. We saw a lot of exciting things, but almost all of them were dead. We saw dead "greenish" rat snakes (Pantherophis obsoletus), dead copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix), dead green snakes (Opheodrys aestivus), dead spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata), dead painted turtles, three species of dead water snakes (Nerodia sipedon, erythrogaster, and fasciata) even a dead pygmy rattler (Sistrurus miliarus) - one of the really sweet pink ones the region is famous for.

As for live critters, I nearly busted out laughing when we slammed on the brakes, jumped out all helter skelter, and then discovered (to Scott and Josh's chagrin) that we'd gotten that excited for this little brown snake (Storeria dekayi), who looked a lot like the dozens I'd been finding back home in West Philly:

Heres a live toad we pulled off the road. It looks like a Fowler's toad (Bufo fowleri) but it was actually a southern toad (Bufo terrestris), and you might notice the prominent little ridges on its head between the eyes - "cranial bosses" - to use the technical term:

Here's a live baby banded water snake (N. fasciata) we found at dusk, with a penny in one shot for scale:

Here's a ribbon snake (Thamnophis sauritus) blurry but alive (I forgot to mention we found these dead too):


...and its cousin a garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis):

Almost as cute as the hognose snake was a baby corn snake (Pantherophis guttatus). At first we thought it was a baby greenish rat snake (the two closely related species look very much alike as babies), since in the light of our headlamps it looked less red, more gray-toned. I remember being a little unsure of the rat snake ID at the time, but it was only when I looked at these photos that it was obvious to me from the head pattern and coloration it really was a corn snake.


Most snakes run away from you. This one almost seemed like it wanted to play.


And that was about it for the evenings. After a few days we decided that with the mediocre luck we were having around the pocosin lakes, it was best to head south, where I'll pick up in the next post.

I'll leave with a cute, weird looking little frog I flipped together with a ground skink (Scincella lateralis) on our way out of town. The frog is called a narrowmouth toad (Gastrophryne carolinensis), and it's the first one I've ever found.

Scouting does help. I can't say it's completely satisfying to hike around in the mid 30s through marshy creeks and bushwhack through briars and saplings to vernal pools in the middle of the woods, but it was a hell of a lot better than sitting around at home staring at the rain or snow. I think some part of what I get out of herping is the enjoyment of the outdoors, hiking through something besides concrete and asphalt, smelling something besides car exhaust or whatever my apartment smells like, seeing trees and other vegetation all around me.

This was a spot I had initially scouted back in the summer. This came of some satellite image scanning. I had spotted what I thought were vernal pools and a marshy creek running through forest and some fields on Google Earth. I wrote down the coordinates, and while on another trip this summer I had taken a quick walk out to check it out. At the time I found it not quite worth the effort to hack my way around for a better look, so I put it on the winter back burner.

Scott and I made it back out recently, and although the cold temperature and time of year meant that we wouldn't see any herps, they also meant we had less vegetation to hack through and we could see farther through the forest than we could in the middle of summer.

We wandered around a little, but I checked my GPS unit against the coordinates I had written down, declared that we would walk "That way!" into the forest, and sure enough we popped out a couple minutes later at the edge of a large vernal pool. We repeated this a few times. Not all the pools were so big or so promising, but we now have a great network of pools and a stream to check out in the spring.

I feel better, although of course now I want to do it again the next weekend.

Here's a quick notice that the website for the PA Herp Atlas Project has changed. It looks fabulous, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to Tim Maret and Jason Poston for the change and the ongoing website and surveying project. Here's the notice from Tim about the change:

Hi Everyone,
I’ve got some exciting news about the PA Online Herpetological Atlas. Jason Poston, a visual designer and frequent contributor to the atlas project, has done a terrific job at revamping the entire webpage. He’s also given it a much user friendly address at www.paherpatlas.org. Please check it out. You might also want to check out Jason’s herp identification website at www.paherps.com. There is still a lot of updating to do – I’m working on more user friendly maps, Jason has been working on some brochures, etc., so keep checking back. Please let us know what you think of the new website and send us your suggestions. You will find our e-mail address and a comment submission form under the Contact link.

Tim

I posted about the upcoming GPHS meeting a few weeks ago, but now it's right around the corner and I'd like to remind everyone about it. See below for the details.

-----------------

The Greater Philadelphia Herpetological Society and the Marple Township Environmental Advisory Board present a free lecture on

Wetland Buffers and Amphibians

by Robin Mann,

VP, Sierra Club,

President, Darby Creek Valley Association

8 PM, 23 January 2009

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.

Christmas found us again in Roswell, Georgia, a suburb to the north of Atlanta. It's not a bad place to be herping in the dead of winter. It gets cold there, but not quite cold enough to freeze over bodies of water.

Since I'll always herp if there's a worthwhile spot nearby, each time I'm down I take advantage of two nice pieces of real estate near the house - there's the ravine out behind the house, and then there's a nice wooded park a mile away from the house.

In both spots I've been having trouble identifying the salamanders - not just one time, not just two times, but for three or four years of Christmas herping trips I haven't been able to figure out what kind of salamanders I was catching. I knew they were dusky salamanders (genus Desmognathus), a group of stream-side/stream-bed salamanders that can be hard to tell apart.

When we used to go flip rocks in the North Georgia mountains there were sometimes four or five species of duskies to choose from, but in Roswell there are only two, which means this should be easy. The contestants are the spotted dusky (D. fuscus conanti) and the seal salamander (D. monticola).

The spotted dusky is basically a variation of our own common dusky, but supposedly with a more strongly spotted pattern down the back. The seal is a bigger salamander, usually with a lighter, wormy kind of pattern.

Unfortunately what I've been catching have been dark salamanders with only a faint pattern on dark gray backgrounds, so the dorsal (back) patterns haven't been any help at all.

Last year (and again in September) I took photos of these unhelpful salamander backs and discovered that the easiest way to tell the two species apart is their bellies (seal have solid colored bellies, dusky have mottled). Great. I didn't have any shots of the bellies, but I was really leaning seal, so that's what I wrote down.

On Christmas Day I went for an afternoon walk in the park (sunny and 60 degrees - not a bad Christmas) and flipped rocks along the creek. Here's a shot of a rock that hid a salamander, and in the second photo you can see the salamander's burrow that drops it down into the water to get away.


























I caught two of the squirmy guys, one a thick, beefy looking salamander like a lot of the ones I catch in the stream.


































































To be sure I got all the necessary photos, this year I pinned two of these squirmy little salamanders down for some quality photos - careful shots of their backs AND of their little salamander bellies. What did I find?




























The patterns on the backs look a little vague to me, but the bellies are definitely mottled. I've been catching spotted duskies, even if they don't look very spotted.

A few days later, on a wet, slightly cooler (55 degrees) December 28th, Jen and I headed back behind the house into the ravine. We didn't find any duskies, but we were also looking for a mystery salamander Jen had seen on an earlier trip. She didn't know what it was, but she knew it wasn't a southern redback (Plethodon serratus) and it wasn't a dusky - this was a bigger salamander, maybe a slimy (Plethodon glutinosis).

It turns out she was right. We caught four in about twenty minutes.




























Last, we also found this little bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) under a rock next to the stream.