One of the interesting herping projects I'll probably never actually do is the 16 mile trek along the entire length of Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia. For a long time I've thought it would be cool to start at one end - either at City Ave. or down where Cobbs Creek flows into Darby Creek - and walk to the other, watching the water for turtles, flipping cover along the way, and hoping for one of the fabled black racers (Coluber constrictor) of Cobbs Creek to cross my path.


It sounds like such a fun urban herping idea, but now for the second spring in a row, I don't think I care enough to make it happen. I know that sounds awful, but each time I think about a free spring day for herping, I'd rather be searching for spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata) outside the city or finding timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus) well up in the mountains to our north and west. Of course if I ever win the lottery or find some other way to spend more time herping I'll do it, but as long as other herping goals are competing for my time, it probably won't happen. All that boils down to me just not caring enough, doesn't it?


I still do make it out there, don't get me wrong, but only for the shorter visits - an early morning trip squeezed in before a brunch date, an evening after work in June to listen to the bullfrogs. I know there's nothing wrong with this, but I've got a complex mix of emotions about the place - defensive advocacy of a local park, annoyance at its decrepitude, anger at the kids who catch and 'sell' every snake and turtle they see there - and I'm frustrated at myself for paying too little focused attention to the Creek and its wooded corridor only a mile or so from my apartment.

A couple weeks ago I found myself on Passover with the day off of work and the sun shining outside. The holiday revolves around a celebration of our freedom from slavery, of course, but it's also a fundamental celebration of spring. Before our ancestors ever went down to Egypt, even before they were monotheists, they were sheep and goat herders who slaughtered spring lambs as a sacrifice to honor the changing of the season.


I don't slaughter lambs and paint the blood on my doorpost, but how about a walk outside on a beautiful spring day? I thought about driving out to the country to go turtling, but I didn't feel quite right about the car ride or taking advantage of a religious day off to go herping. Instead I thought about the park nearby, where I could go for a nice walk first and foremost, and maybe do a little herping along the way.

For those who have never seen a gartersnake swim over calm water, this is one of the most beautiful sights that Earth has to offer. I have yet to get a good photo, but I remember seeing a garter snake swim across the creek by the skating rink (roughly at Spruce St.) last year. It slid off the bank and onto the water, inscribing a rippling sine curve over the surface, its pale vertebral stripe and long dark flanks echoed in the gentle wake fanning out to either side.

That bold stripe on the gartersnake's back is not exactly camouflage. Try to catch a gartersnake, and you'll often find your hand landing just behind it or on its tail even if you aim for the middle of the snake. After a few tries you can feel like a terrible klutz. Don't worry, it's not your fault. Your eyes initially fix on a point along the solid stripe, but the snake is moving, so the initial point that your eyes hit moves along the line without your brain noting the forward progress - you keep your eyes fixed relative to the stable ground instead of relative to the snake's body. This is a disconcerting optical illusion that gives many striped snakes an escape advantage. It adds a flowing grace to a gartersnake in any setting but especially so on the water as it adopts the fluid properties of its medium.

I passed a jogger on the track and a man at a picnic table on my way to the water. No gartersnakes greeted me there, just the storm sewer odor of trash and decay and some small fish holding steady in the current.

I set off down the path to the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center (CCCEEC) and made a few stops to watch the water, spotting only rocks, trash, and fish. A couple teen girls were pumping music and shining a car in the CCCEEC's parking lot, and they didn't seem to pay any attention as I rolled logs and looked under rocks. I sometimes find garter snakes there, but nobody was home.

Back in the woods to the south of the CCCEEC I found redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) under almost everything I checked. Whatever bad things I can say about Cobbs Creek and its wooded corridor, the salamanders sure like it.

A fierce debate on Field Herp Forum about whether artificial cover (trash, boards, sheets of tin, old furniture, carpet, etc.) increases herp population densities or only makes them easier to observe (yes, this is serious stuff in our world) reminded me that the pieces of cover under which I look are not necessarily better salamander homes than leaf litter or tree roots - things I can't lift up so easily - so maybe I should assume that however many salamanders I've found under a rock (like the three under this one) should be assumed to hang out in every similar area around me: 3 + 3 +3 +3 +3... It's like counting stars by drawing a small imaginary square above you and then trying to figure out how many such squares could cover the full night sky - it blows the mind and again reminds me that small creatures rule the earth, whatever we think.

I would be eager to wade in most creeks in our region, but not in the one closest to my apartment, Cobbs Creek. (To be more accurate, I should refer to it as the above-ground creek closest to my apartment. There are at least two closer creeks that run underground as storm sewers, including Mill Creek, a name that pops up a lot from the mid 40s north of Haverford Ave. south down 43rd St. Note that 43rd seems to run down a small valley and into Clark Park, the south block of which - the bowl - used to be a mill pond, and then down into the Schuylkill River. Check out Philly H20 for a great account of the now-underground creeks of Philadelphia.) Why not jump right in? Check out these photos of where Naylor's Run emerges from under Delaware County and flows out into Cobbs Creek.



I noticed this unwholesome pale green color wherever water flowed out of storm sewers and into the creek. I'm not sure whether it's due to chemicals in the water or maybe some difference in algae in the colder water flowing from underground, but it did nothing to make me want to jump in.

In case I need a reminder, I found this encouraging sign downstream. More on this later.

Much of the ground in the forest is covered with a beautiful green carpet speckled with lemon yellow flowers. It could fill you with the joy of spring - life rushing to receive the sun and wildflowers just bursting out of the ground - until you learn that the ground cover is an invasive exotic weed. Lesser celandine, a.k.a. fig buttercup, is from Europe and nastily outgrows everything else, replacing a diverse native flora with a relatively sterile monoculture. As resolved as I am to fight invasive exotic species, I wish I could remove that piece of knowledge from my brain and simply enjoy the beauty of the yellow and green landscape.

Here's another bad character, Japanese knotweed, sprouting from the insidious buttercup. By the middle of the summer it will form dense banks ten feet tall and preclude all other vegetation. That's Cobbs Creek for you - invasive exotics and that lingering fetid smell of runoff.




But I really did have a good time, I just have to avoid thinking about it too much. I was walking a wavy line through a densely populated urban neighborhood, but I never would have known it by looking - the green tunnel effect formed by the forest and the slopes down to the path and creek kept me pleasantly ignorant of the concrete and asphalt on the other sides. Isn't this why we go on nature walks?

I walked through a couple fields that I keep an eye on for racers. To my mind the most reliable way to find racers is flipping cover in old, overgrown fields. They might also live in forests (again that worry about misinterpreting ease of finding animals as their actual abundance), but most that I have found have been under boards in fields or hanging out in forests right near fields.

One of the fields is on the Philadelphia side, the other is on the Yeadon side - reminding me that indeed I was on the border with Delaware County.



My understanding is that these are old ball fields that Fairmont Park is letting grow to help mitigate Cobbs Creek's surface runoff problems. By that I mean that all the dog crap, lawn fertilizer, and motor oil on the sidewalks and streets gets washed into the creek each time it rains, a problem for aquatic life and people who are close enough to the creek to smell it. Generally plants and trees help soak up the chemicals and other crap before it reaches the water. A forest is ideal, and a high meadow is better. A mowed field is probably better than an impermeable surface like a parking lot, but letting the field turn into a meadow, and maybe eventually into a forest helps even more.

I saw no racers. I think I freaked out a man, a teenage girl (I presume his daughter ), and their dog in one field by walking around the edge inspecting trash and the ground underneath trash. There are deer back here, and dogs too, judging by the prints in a pile of sand in one of the fields. Why a pile of sand in the middle of a field? I haven't figured that one out yet.



I took a picture of a mallard couple and a goose swimming around, not that the world needs more photos of the super common waterfowl, but it's a representative spot on the creek and not a bad place to sit and watch the water.

I saw some less common birds here too - a kingfisher, a red-bellied woodpecker, and a nuthatch. Or I should say less common in West Philadelphia? I think I'd see a lot more of these in a heavily wooded suburb or out in the country.

I liked the remnants of an old bridge I found in the creek.



I'm not sure when a road last ran through here, but it reminds me about Cobbs Creek's industrial past. If the creek is now a natural break in the urban landscape, it is a recent role reversal. For about two-hundred and fifty years the creek was an industrial break in an agricultural landscape, back before electricity when water ran heavy machinery. Then the land on either side was all farms and villages and the creek powered mills to grind grain into flour, weave fabric, or even produce gunpowder (see Philly H20 for more).

My pulse peaked at an otherwise undistinguished bend in the creek south of the fields when I heard the shallow plunk of a turtle jumping into the water. This is one of the basic sounds of herping, along with the sharper splash of frogs leaping into the water from the shore and the slide of a snake through grass or leaves. I ran up to the edge of the steep bank down to the creek and saw one more turtle tip off the log and into the murky water.

This was a major victory for me. I wasn't completely sure of the turtle species, although I was leaning strongly towards the somewhat exotic red-eared slider or "RES" (Trachemys scripta elegans - popular pets from the Mississippi watershed). An exotic species was a bit of a let down, but pinning any turtles to one spot on the creek has taken me at least a year and a half of staring at the water and taking advice from locals to check out pools and bends that looked as empty and sterile to me as any other.

Why should there be so few turtles in Cobbs Creek? It flows into the Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, turtle capital of Southeast PA, and it looks exactly like turtle-rich creeks I've seen elsewhere. There should be snappers (Chelydra serpentina) every few yards under the water, painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) basking everywhere, and stinkpots (Sternotherus oderatus) trudging along the bottom and basking on overhanging branches. I haven't seen any of those common local species. Maybe it's the pollution, and maybe it's the local kids who grab anything they can and try to sell it to their friends (I've had kids tell me about this, and other Cobbs Creek fans have complained about it too). Either way, it pains me to have a creek with so few turtles, so that plunk was music to my ears.

It was close to lunch time, so I settled down on a stump and watched the water. I saw a few turtles hovering around their basking spot, watching me warily. This photo shows the side of this turtle's head well enough to ID it as a slider.



I saw one slider chasing another (presumably a male after a female) close to the bank. I ran down to try to grab one, but they were just out of reach, and I just couldn't convince myself to jump in after them.

I was wrapping up lunch when I saw a garter snake swim across - beautiful as always, but at a bad angle for a photo. I did take a picture of the snake pausing next to a basketball on the bank (asking the turtles for a game?), and then of course I had to run on down and pick it up for a closer look.



It was a basic garter - average side, average pattern, typical stinky musk. It sported a terrible scar on its back and sides. Something once tore into it - maybe a bird, maybe a fox, maybe a snapping turtle? I shudder to think of how it looked when the wound was fresh, and I wished the snake better luck in the future as I let it go into the fig buttercup.

A little further down I passed a guy walking a couple pit bulls. Sometimes I get sick of the all the pit bulls. Am I the only person who thinks they're pathetically ugly dogs? I suppose the point of a pit bull is to radiate brute strength on behalf of the owner, but that speaks to me more of insecurity. Show me a man walking a Chihuahua and I'll know I'm looking at someone who doesn't care what anyone else thinks about him.

I was pretty close to my Mt. Moriah destination at this point, but the trail led up out of the ravine. I had to pop up onto the sidewalk along Cobbs Creek Parkway.


I should mention the robins. As much as I ignore birds in this blog, I do notice them when they're flying and hopping around me, and the robins were everywhere I looked. Here's one by the bike path along the Parkway.

I was only a minute away from Mt Moriah at this point, the center of my Cobbs Creek herping activity. As I posted a little earlier I recently found a northern watersnake (Nerodia sipedon - see below) there to add to the gartersnake, jillions of redback salamanders, and merely hundreds (my rough estimate) of brown snakes (Storeria dekayi).

Mt. Moriah is one of my great guilty pleasures. It's a pleasure for being an urban herper's paradise - a few hundred rough acres of trees, brush, and high grass with more artifical cover to look under than I can get to without spending the night. Of course camping there would involve spending time with the prostitutes, semi-wild dogs, and other unsavory characters who hang out there after I've gone.

As for the guilty part of the pleasure, I don't think any cemetery should look like that, and I can't quite feel satisfied with taking advantage of the neglect of thousands of our deceased neighbors, people whose families didn't expect them to spend eternity under piles of trash and toppled headstones.



To be fair, some of the cemetery is still kept up.



But unfortunately it's hard to avoid the realization that the decrepitute sometimes adds to the beauty of the place. I prefer meadow to mown grass.

I think the brown snakes do too, and I found a few to take pictures of before turning around and heading back up the creek.


I wasn't the only person up in the cemetery that afternoon. I saw a nicely dressed white woman jumping out of a very nice car to look at a grave marker - I assume looking for a relative or doing some research; she showed no inclination to hang around. At the bottom of the hill a guy sat in his car talking on his cell phone; I'm always suspicious of people choosing to hang out there inside a car, apparently not even enjoying the nice day on a nice hillside.

And then there was the dead dog.

I had visited a week before, and there hadn't been a dead pit bull rotting on the side of the dirt road. Its ribs were exposed, the face pulled back in a tight rictus exposing the teeth. I suppose someone could have dumped a half-rotten dog, but I also wonder if scavengers could have taken the flesh off its bones.

I passed more people on my way back, but none more interesting than the girls in bikinis by the No Swimming/Sewage sign. At first I thought people were planning on swimming right near where it says not to go swimming. I know plenty of people hop into swimming holes at local creeks; that's what these people in bathing suits would be doing. But who goes swimming in high heels? Who wears high heels with string bikinis? And that much makeup? And only hangs out with other really hot young women in bikinis? And with a fully dressed guy arranging how they were draping themselves over the chain link fence?

One of the girls smiled and said hi as I walked back. I smiled and said hi right back. Just downhill three more impressively attractive young women in bikinis and high heels were wrapped in towels. "Hi honey," one of them said, which struck me as a little odd. I'm probably ten years older than she is. I tried not to think about it.

A little further down the path I passed the kind of dog I'd like to see more of - mid-size and a little shaggy. Not intimidating at all, just a friendly looking mutt. An older man in a work jump suit walked on the other end of the leash, carrying a tall can of Colt 45 in a paper bag. We greeted each other, and I smiled as I thought of what he'd see in a few seconds - "Works every time!"

Hot bikini models aside, I've got unrealistically high hopes for Cobbs Creek. Here's what the pragmatist on my shoulder says: It's a beautiful wooded creek corridor with lots of potential, but it is never going to be a good herping spot, except in the light of the abysmally low expectations I have for a polluted, abused urban landscape drained by a large, open storm sewer.

As soon as I write that, the idealistic pro-urban herper on the other shoulder defensively shouts back, "give it a chance! There are gartersnakes and brown snakes, bull frogs and redback salamanders! What about the snappers? The racers? The rumor of box turtles?" Cobbs Creek has a lot to offer, even if it is horribly polluted by street runoff, overrun with invasive exotic species, and its reptiles over-poached by the local kids.

But I haven't found any racers, or snappers, or any hint of a box turtle. True I've found the bull frogs (Rana caterbeiana), the garters, and one brown snake, but that's it. Maybe it's worth a nice walk after work or on a Sunday afternoon when I don't have time to go anywhere else, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to that big 16-mile hike I've been planning for two years.

Is it enough that it's worth a nice walk on a beautiful day? I can ride my bike out there in ten minutes, and I can enjoy the salamanders and the snakes with next to no effort. However many rattlesnakes I can find in the mountains, it takes me a couple hours to get to them. I like bull frogs, and watching them rumble away from the shore on a June evening can make me happy. I might even catch myself a red-eared slider if I can work up to touching the water.

I know it's not fun for the snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) to be grabbed by the tail and hauled into a boat (to be clear I had one hand on the tail, the other under the plastron), but damn if it isn't fun for the human!

And what made it worse for the turtle was that a moment before it had been mounting another turtle. At least I think that was what it was doing. Shoshi and I were canoeing down a creek in a marsh, preparing for a nature walk Scott and I would be leading the next day by catching critters for the show-and-tell, and I was keeping my eyes open for a nice snapping turtle. So I was thrilled to see what looked like two of them, one climbing on top of the other. To be honest it's hard to tell what one snapper is doing to another in that situation. They could have been fighting. A female could have been rejecting a male (about the same as fighting), or she could have been more receptive.

By the time we cruised up to the turtles they had separated, and I was hopping out of the canoe into the shallow water and deeper mud. Shoshi, to her credit, was already questioning my judgment - "Billy, what are you doing?" "Billy, what are we going to do with it?" Of course I had not come up with answers to those questions, but better to give myself the extra moments to try; if the turtles got away and then I came up with a way to transport it back upstream and then think of a way to contain it for 24 hours I'd feel really stupid, no?

Grabbing a snapper in these situations is easier than you might think. While they're in the water they tend not to bite (the next day I patted one on the back in the water and it just sat there - kind of like a water tortoise), and you basically just get a good grip on the tail, get another hand in an un-bitable position (under the belly or gripping the shell right behind the head - the gutsiest grip there is) and hoist. So in second I had the turtle up and over the side of the canoe.

Placing it facing Shoshi probably wasn't the most thoughtful move. It hissed, snapped, and took a step or two towards her, even biting the end of the paddle she lowered to try to block it.


In all the action I didn't get many good photos. I now wish I'd snapped a shot of the turtle's inch-long claws, for example.

Shoshi and I had a very quick conversation in this position. The turtle was making it clear that it would not sit passively in the bottom of the canoe while we paddled around, and even now I can't figure out how we could have managed it without more equipment.

More on the nature walk and the other critters we detained for it in future posts...

The Mt. Moriah Cemetery continues to surprise me. I keep finding lots of brown snakes (Storeria dekayi), which I expect. Here are six young brown snakes that I shook out of the infamous magical pants that I still only dare handle at the waist. One of them puked up a partially digested earthworm - puking is bad enough when you eat three times a day, but when you eat three times a week it's a much bigger waste.



I keep finding redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) up there under almost everything I pick up, and I expect the occasional garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis), but I wasn't expecting this little critter, a northern watersnake (Nerodia sipedon) under some trash in the weeds at the top of the hill. Watersnakes, as the name implies, usually stick next to water - it can be a marsh, a pond, a river, a creek in the woods, but always near water.


I probably shouldn't be surprised - Cobbs Creek runs around the cemetery in sort of a hairpin at 100 to 200 yards from when I found the snake,and I know watersnakes live in the Creek, even if I hardly ever see them. Still it's a little strange to find one near the top of the hill and not right next to the water.

I wonder what it was doing - I can't imagine it planned to hang out up there so far from minnows and tadpoles. Maybe it was taking a short cut over the hill (an epic journey for such a tiny snake) and was crashing for the night halfway there?

In case you're wondering what it plans to be when it grows up, check out this big one I found a few years ago in Virginia:

Hi Philly-area herp enthusiasts, here's the lowdown on the next herp society meeting. The society is now called (we hope this is a final name) the Delaware Valley Herpetological Society. We need to be clear that this is a distinct entity from the old Philadelphia Herpetological Society.

Anyhow, here's the flyer contents for the next meeting. We might switch the order around for the business/educational/turtle walk components of the meeting, but it'll be a good time with a nice mix of educational and just plain fun turtle watching:

The Delaware Valley Herpetological Society

(formerly the Greater Philadelphia Herpetological Society)

Invite you to celebrate

WORLD TURTLE DAY

with them at the Heinz Wildlife Refuge

Saturday Morning, 23 May 2009

starting at 9AM in the Cusano Center

Gary Stolz will welcome us to the refuge and show us around. His talk will be followed by a DVHS business meeting to discuss changes to the Constitution and Bylaws. Once the sun is high in the sky, we will go out turtle-spotting. If we don’t get our fill of turtles, we may visit one or two more sites.

Bring your binoculars or spotting scopes, cameras with telephoto lenses, and field notebooks.

After our somewhat disappointing but at-the-same-time overwhelming marsh trip, I made Scott run us by the cemetery to look for my GPS unit. While I was packing that morning I hadn't been able to find it, and then I couldn't find it in my car either. That left the last place I'd used it as the logical place to check next, and that place was the cemetery.

It was not easy to get there. From our apartment at 46th and Spruce it seems like a quick shot, but starting from I-76 it's a little bit longer, especially when traffic is thick, half of all West Philly is double parked. and all the red lights are conspiring against you.

So, we get to the cemetery, I a little embarrassed, Scott doing a fine job of not kicking my ass for dragging him out there. It would be just plain silly to expect us to look for the GPS unit without flipping AC for brown snakes (Storeria dekayi).

We quickly turned up some yearlings (one of which is a lot bigger than the others now that I look at it - a big one or a year older?)






Then, under a completely ordinary asphalt roofing shingle, I discovered the most beautiful brown snake of ALL TIME!!!

The brown snake fans out there will see what I'm talking about - that pale gray stripe set off from the tan sides by the sharp black double row of spots, the delicate black head markings - this girl is just plain gorgeous.

As for the brown snake nonbelievers who are wondering about what I'm talking about - all of you can go to hell. This snake rocks, and if you can't dig it, go read another blog.

(and then I found the GPS unit at the bottom of a bag we had actually had with us the whole time - I thought that was funny. Scott didn't agree).

Scott made a really depressing comment towards the end of our April 5th marsh herping trip. He remarked that we're too optimistic in the winter. Back in January, when we're sick to insanity of the cold, ice, and general dormancy of the herp world, we tend to look to April as the promised land (if a month can be a land), when spotted turtles will be tripping over themselves to walk in front of us and rat snakes will be dropping from the trees into our hands. The reality is that we get skunked pretty often, even in the bountiful spring weather of April.

If I'd had my potato rake with me I would have thrown it at Scott's head. Who needs a comment like that after a long, tiring day of fruitless herping? And on such a beautiful day! It's one thing to strike out, but it's much, much worse to strike out on a sunny April day with temps up into the low 60s - just about PERFECT for spotted turtles, and pretty damn good for a long list of toads, frogs, and snakes, almost none of which we actually saw.

Here's what we did see. I'll start with the most common and most basic, the beautiful painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) that always show up in the ponds, and that earn our disdain with their easy reliability. Sometimes I want to see how many skips I can manage with a good side-armed throw over the water, but so far I've resisted that urge.



Next up, a red-spotted newt (Nopthalmus viridiscens). Newts are about as special and exciting as painted turtles, but I do really like the little guys. They're so easy to catch, and they're genuinely pretty in breeding season.

Check out this bad boy's tail fin and swollen cloaca (vent, general purpose anal opening) - signs that he's looking for some female newt action.




So, what I said right up there about their being easy to catch? That's probably true, but I still suck at it. I kept seeing newts in the shallow water in front of me JUST as they dove into the dead grass and muck, always one step ahead of the dull human. I didn't even catch this one that we found hovering at the edge of the creek - I tried a couple grabs and missed, and then Scott stepped in and actually caught it.

Scott also nabbed this beast of a snapper (Chelydra serpentina). It's about average size for an adult, and we found it towards the end of our trip, when we really did need some action, even if it was common snapping turtle action.

Scott hauled it out of the watery mud by its tail and back legs and plopped it up on slightly elevated mud.


If you're planning on catching snappers, be aware that they don't just take that kind of treatment without complaint. This one hissed a little and then turned back to launch some snaps scarily close to Scott's crotch, even after Scott had let go of the snapper's tail and yelled "Hey now! That's enough!"


We were impressed with this snapper's moxy (not that snappers ever lack moxy), but we can't say the same for its intelligence. Snappers often flee not by swimming, exactly, but by diving into the mud and then quickly tunnelling beneath the mud to escape. It's an impressive feat to observe, that bulge in the mud receding into the distance like something in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

This one chose to begin its under-mud escape in the middle of a patch of sedge, which struck me as a mistake. Of course I could be wrong; by the time we left it, it was deeper into the sedge than when it had started, and it might have been strong enough to rip down through the roots into the mud.


One thing we did accomplish while we were out there was to explore some gorgeous marsh habitats. "Marsh" might mean all one thing to a lot of people, but there's a lot of variety in there, from cattail marshes that are thick with the reeds and only a little soggy with water, to the lush, flowing edges of creeks, and to swaths of sedges with shallow, even sheet flow.








Even if it wasn't a perfect day, you can't walk away disappointed from a hike in such beautiful country, whatever your herping buddy says to piss you off.

Last night I had a wonderful time helping American toads (Bufo americanus) cross the road... in Philadelphia. A year ago I never would have imagined that volunteers working with the city could shut down traffic on streets around the Roxborough Reservoir to protect migrating toads, but I'm delighted to see that they pulled it off.

These folks deserve a lot of credit. Public Eye, led by Lisa Levinson (I've known Lisa for a long time, and I can't think of anyone with more energy or a bigger heart), works at the heart of the project. They've collaborated with people living around the reservoir to lobby the city and organize the effort, complete with toad counters, toad crossing guards (my official volunteer position), and people to staff the road blocks. We had Dave Cellini - one of the toad neighbors - come talk to the herp society (now officially the "Delaware Valley Herpetological Society") and I think we were all impressed with Dave's passion for protecting our local wildlife.

I bet you're thinking of a dumb joke that starts, "Why did the toad cross the road?" Sure they're trying to get to the other side, but the real reason is sex. Like many other amphibians, American toads breed once per year in big, loud, lusty aggregations - we might call them orgies if we weren't being scientific about it.

The problem is that roads surround the reservoir, so the toads have to face down cars and trucks to make it from their woods and backyard homes to the water. Here's a Google satellite image of the area for reference:

Here's a shot of one of the fearless little guys.

I'd like to say we were completely successful, but I saw three or four DORs. Here's one of the casualties:

Here are two that successfully made it across. Toads make cute little chirps when they want to be released - this applies to toads we pick up but also toads that get grabbed by other toads against their will. Male toads are full of lust and not noted for their intelligence - they've been documented attempting to mate with all kinds of outlandish things, from boots to tennis balls, and even roadkill toads - so it helps for one male toad to tell another male toad to let go so that they both can pursue females unencumbered. I heard just such a chirp from the side of the road, where I spotted one hopping closely after another.

Toads weren't the only ones partying that night. We spotted this pickerel frog (Rana palustris) making the same trip (sorry for the off-kilter photo. They keep loading like this, dammit Blogger).

The Mill Creek Farm is up and running again for the 2009 season, which also means I've been excited to check out the brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) that live there. On Wednesday (March 25th) they had their second volunteer workday, and I showed up to help turn over their beds, and of course check around for brown snakes.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the high 50s, and I had a good time working the broad fork - kind of like a gigantic hair pick with two handles that you jam into the soil and then pull back on to pry up the soil.

I checked around for brown snakes, even slipping alongside the bee hives by the back fence (still haven't been stung yet, and there's something oddly calming about the buzz of bees leaving and arriving back at the hives) to check some cover there.

I was a little surprised to find no snakes at all. The co-directors, Jade and Johanna, report that they haven't seen any snakes at all yet this season, and this is about when they started seeing them last year.

I can't say I'm not a little concerned. Brown snakes have been showing up elsewhere in West Philly for a couple weeks already - in front of Jim's house, at Mt. Moriah Cemetery, even at a friend's community garden as I learned Friday night at a dinner party.

The city knocked down a decrepit, abandoned row house to the back of the Mill Creek Farm, and I'm a little worried the demolition activity might have disturbed the snakes in the middle of the winter or wrecked their hibernaculum completely. I'm probably jumping to an unnecessary conclusion, and I hope to be proven wrong in the next few weeks.

I rode from the farm down to Mt. Moriah cemetery, where I finally turned up an adult brown snake. Scott and I were joking about how we take an absurdly high number of photos of the first critters of the spring, even if they're common species we'll probably see dozens more times through the year, and this pretty female was a victim of my delight to be holding an adult brown snake again. Here are a couple of the shots I took:



I turned over another piece of cover to reveal three snakes sitting together, but two escaped before I could grab them, leaving me with just this plain male for photos. His belly looked awful - spotted with what I assume is some kind of skin infection. Hibernation isn't always good for the skin, as the ugly looking snakes we find in March and early April demonstrate, and I think he should look better after his first shed.


Last, here are a couple shots of one of the omnipresent redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus), this one the leadback phase.

One last little interesting anecdote: at the Mill Creek Farm one of the neighborhood kids was talking with me about catching snakes, and he told me about a vacant lot not too far away where he and his friends catch brown snakes. I asked him a little more about the vacant lot, and he said that it's one of the cleaned-up lots with grass and a nice little wooden fence around the border, but that he and his friends set down some old car wheels - the metal part, sans tire - and a few days later they come back and check under the metal to find the brown snakes. It was cool to see 9-year olds figuring out what it can take herpers years to figure out, that laying out artificial cover can make it easier to catch snakes.