I often wonder about how Nature (or the herping gods, or just "God") metes out rewards for herping effort. Sometimes we do everything right - we study landscape and weather conditions, we wake up early and pack the right equipment, we drive far, then hike far, and with our muscles aching and water bottles nearly empty we find something spectacular. The universe feels just in those moments of triumph - we worked hard, and we were rewarded.


Other times we curse our luck and shake our fists at the heavens. These are the times we study landscape and weather conditions, wake up early and pack the right equipment, drive and hike long distances, and then have to call it quits with sunburns and aching feet even though we've found nothing. The cosmos is a fickle and mean place in those moments, ungrateful for our sacrifice of sweat and time, sleep, and (most dear) family and social obligations ignored.


And then there are the times when we are rewarded for nothing - being in the right place at an unexpectedly right time? Keeping our eyes open? Wearing clean socks?


On Memorial Day Scott and I took a trip to Forbidden Ridge. That's not the real name of the mountain, but it's our name for it - last year I explored a ridge of spectacular rattler habitat and told Scott about it, but I wanted to go other places instead of that ridge in the fall, leading Scott to joke that I didn't want him to hit it, and thus to my naming it "Forbidden Ridge."


Well, this Memorial Day Forbidden Ridge was allowed. I didn't know if we were hitting it too late; a couple earlier rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) trips had gone poorly, and we were getting the impression that they had dispersed earlier than we had expected they would.


We had a simple plan for the Memorial Day hike. I had found one snake on a ledge on Forbidden Ridge in August - a fat, yellow, beautiful pregnant female basking to 'cook her babies,' to use the elegant herper expression. Scott and I set out from our car to hike right to that ledge and work out in each direction from there.


As I type this my left leg is elevated alongside the keyboard. My left knee is my 'bad' knee, the lingering legacy of my brief tae kwan do hobby and the injury that ended it nine years ago. Four years ago I spent too much time on a steep slope in the Wissahickon cutting back devil's walking stick, an invasive exotic tree as nasty as it sounds. My bad knee ached and swelled, apparently because the relatively loose ligaments permitted more play on that steep slope than the bones and cartilage could take. I've hunted timbers before on other slopes, but Forbidden Ridge is probably the rockiest, most precarious to navigate, and again my knee was not up to the task. I'll point out that I've herped many rocky slopes with no such injury, and I've hiked for miles and miles on ridge tops without anything more than sore muscles. My point is that Forbidden Ridge is a bitch of a mountain. Some stretches of the path are even dirt and gravel, but other long sections are nothing but loose boulders (talus slopes - kind of like gravel poured out of a bucket but with the stones ranging from the size of a basketball to that of a Mini Cooper). You don't so much walk as you jump, scramble, and slide your way, landing each foot at funny angles on hard rock. Off the trail you get more talus and short ledges you have to climb up onto and then back down to get to the next. Guess where the rattlers hang out? None of this is easy on the knees.

About halfway through one of these sections of boulders but still way downhill from the destination ledge, Scott pulled up short with a stunned expression, not scared, just pure overwhelming amazement. I had been picking a path up the hillside parallel to his and a few yards over, but I quickly looped back to come up behind him. This is what we saw:

A couple snakes skedaddled as we stared in awe and pulled out our cameras, and we're pretty sure there were nine to start with. Here's another shot Scott took from right above them.

Once the more nervous snakes had retreated the others (six or seven) settled down and resumed their basking. Scott spotted another small black rattler basking a few feet away, making it ten for this spot.

What the hell do you do in this situation? It was the closest thing to a religious vision, a supernatural apparition, that I've ever seen. Do you wait for the voice of God to speak to you from the rock, as it would from a no-more-spectacular burning bush? Do you just take photos and move on? We debated the merits of catching them and sexing them, but in the end we just hung around for a few more minutes ogling the snakes and snapping photos.

One or two had buzzed at us in retreat, but the remaining snakes stayed pretty quiet. One responded to Scott's shifting a few feet away with my favorite rattlesnake communication - a few lazy shakes of the tail, enough to let us know it was still watching us, but clear that it didn't feel like disturbing its morning enough to move or even rattle at full speed.

Eventually we tore ourselves away and continued up the mountain, elated and giggling but aware that the weather conditions must be about perfect right at that moment; if any other snakes were out, we'd best get moving to find them.

And find them we did! If ten rattlesnakes wasn't enough for one morning, how about these three ten minutes later? (dig me grinning like a love-struck idiot in the last shot):

...and then one more!

(sometime before that one snake a bush had picked my pocket. The photo above is Scott's, because when I reached for my camera - technically Jen's - it was gone. We retraced our steps and found it hanging from its wrist strap on a twig in a bush I had squeezed by.)

By this point our count had hit fourteen, an absurdly high total of rattlers by anyone's standards. We still hadn't hit the target ledge, though, so the day wasn't over yet. Scott and I decided to split up for a while, the better to cover more ground, and in about a half hour I got his call that he had found two more (=16).

Shortly after that I reached the original destination ledge and found these two black rattlers (=18) chilling out in the shade, an indication that the day had grown too warm for direct basking.

That they were sitting in the shade meant two things to us - first we were probably out of time to discover more snakes; rattlers in the shade are harder to see than rattlers sitting in the sun. Second it meant that we really had better watch our steps as we waded through thick brush between the outcroppings and boulders.

Here are some shots of the difficult greenbriar. Its thorns aren't as hard and sharp as multiflora rose, but, as Scott observed, its flexibility gives it the nasty habit of wrapping around you without your realizing it and only piercing your clothing when you're already well entangled. Here's a bank of it followed by an individual vine.

At some point we had to call it quits, but on our way back down the mountain we had to check in with the big pile o'rattlers again. We always worry about other herpers using our photos to deduce the locations we herp (hence no big habitat shots in these rattler posts), but it came as some comfort that even the two of us, who had been there a few hours earlier and had the coordinates in hand, wandered around in circles for five minutes before Scott said, "Oh, there they are."

Three were sitting in the shade together:

Four or five more (hard to tell) were a few feet away chilling under a bush:



At some point on our hike back to the car, Scott commented that it's a little sad that we'll never see something that amazing again. I'm not sure I agree (a ratsnake or a box turtle would put another similar trip over the top), but that day now sits high on my list of lifetime thrills. I feel compelled to summon eloquent words of poetry to describe the wondrous sight of all those beautiful snakes basking in the sun together, normal language not sounding up to the task. But I keep coming back to the cruder terms of my childhood - it was awesome, awesome! AWESOME, AWESOME! It was unconditionally awesome, so awesome I messed up my knee and I don't really care; it was worth it.

I believe I have regained the ratsnakes' favor. They had chosen to ignore me for a couple years, leaving me to wonder what I had done to offend them, but a few weeks ago a black ratsnake (Pantherophis obsoleta) revealed itself to me, and I believe (hope, pray) that I am again in the fold.

You probably get the impression that I am a little crazy for black ratsnakes. If I had to choose my favorite species of snake to observe and to catch, I would pick the black ratsnake - that sounds kind of childish (flashback to the 6 year old Billy chattering to his parents about how neat snakes are), but the time away from ratsnakes had been wearing on me.

Almost every herping trip I've been on outside the city has had ratsnake potential, including the mountain trips I've taken, ostensibly for timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus). Friends and other herpers have reported beautiful ratsnakes, baby ratsnakes, ugly ratsnakes, from places I go all the time. Scott, who got out about half as often as I did over this time period, found at least three.

It's difficult to target ratsnakes - they live in almost all the Delaware Valley's non-urban habitats, but tend to hide in inaccessible places (tree stumps, root holes, hollow logs and trees). You don't find them so much as you stumble across them, and none were presenting themselves before me for stumbling. So I did all I could do, which was seek the more predictable creatures in places where ratsnakes supposedly abound, and keep my eyes open.

Simon and I headed out to one reliable rattler spot at the beginning of May, a place where we found a nice adult black ratsnake two years ago (my last one before the drought) but that since then has produced only rattlers (and one little garter snake - Thamnophis sirtalis). I know I'll earn no herper sympathy for finding "only rattlers" but it was still bugging me that the more common species so completely eluded me at the perfect site.

As we approached the target set of rocky outcroppings my eyes fixed on the thin black shape stretched out from a horizontal crack in the rock. My long search was finally over.

I quickly mentally mapped out a route to the top of the ledge and told Simon to spot me - to guide me from below so I could reach over and pick the snake up even if I couldn't see it from above. I got a little nervous at the last maneuver on the damp, slippery, downward sloping edge of the ledge - lying down on my back, holding onto a dead sapling with my left hand and reaching out just so with my right to pluck the snake from the rock.

It was worth it. I know it's a small ratsnake, but isn't it beautiful?


Here's Simon hamming it up with the snake:


We did also find our official target for the trip, a rattlesnake, but only one. We were happy to see it, but we were perplexed that we saw no others.

We hiked on, undertaking a really, really long trek including some wicked and steep cliff faces and long boring stretches of trails through the woods. It all seems reasonable when you plan it out on paper, but after five or six miles of climbing and hiking you just want to be back in the car.

The local toads demonstrated much more energy. Lots of puddles were full of eggs, and this one including adults producing them:


We found newts (Nopthalmus viridiscens) and lots of tadpoles in other puddles. The tadpoles were probably wood-frogs-to-be (Rana sylvatica). Here's an adult enjoying another puddle:



The strange second highlight of the trip was a black racer (Coluber constrictor). I know what you're thinking, aren't black racers the super-common species that's always chewing on us in New Jersey? Well, I've always stuck up for the black racers, even where they're common, and in the mountains of PA they're not all over the place like they are in the Pine Barrens. Simon and I were trudging along towards a beautiful creek we were going to search for wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta - no luck). Simon spotted a long black snake on the side of the trail, and for a split second I thought, 'ratsnake?', but in a flash it was gone, shooting over the leaves in perfect racer fashion (no ratsnake moves that fast, and a ratsnake would have climbed one of the oodles of trees around us rather than stick to the ground). Simon took off behind it and I flanked it, but the racer matched our full run for a few seconds there. It was doing about 8 miles per hour by my estimate, which is really fast for a snake. It stopped the chase by pulling up into a tall, tough defensive posture, rattling its tail in the leaves nervously and facing us down like a real fighter. Some snakes bluff, but you know a racer is serious.

The first shot is Simon's, with me off to the left waving at the snake to get it to give Simon a view of the side of its head.



We also found some salamanders relatively early on in the trip - one half-grown spring salamander (Gyrinophilus porphyriticus oddly under rocks a few yards from water; we usually find these in the water or right at the edge):

Here's one of the more usual suspects, a slimy salamander (Plethodon glutinosis):


A little later in the week Eitan, Scott, and I came back. I think we hit the site a little too late in the day, since in spite of the pretty, sunny weather we only saw one rattler, a small black one that ducked out of sight before we could get a photo.

Of course we found another toad, this one a youngster:


and then Scott somehow spotted this bizarre and bittersweet little specimen in the brush next to a rock:

It's a dessicated little hognose snake (Heterodon platyrhinos), half eaten by something, sad to see but like all dead herps a sign that they live there, that that mountainside supports a population of the fun, hard-to-find (at least in PA) snakes.

On our way out I pointed to some rocks alongside the trail and complained that the rocks along that particular trail on that mountainside never seem to host any small snakes. I flip rocks along trails like that all over the state and find snakes, why on that particular mountainside should I find none?

Out of spite or stubborn herping habit, I lifted one of those perfect rocks and of course found a half-grown ringneck snake (Diadophis punctatus). It squirmed too much for decent photos, but here it is:


Scott leaned down to flip another of the rocks and found number two, another squirmer that gave us only a blurry shot of its attempt to bite Eitan, adorable in such a small snake:


Gifts from the ratsnakes?

We had a lovely Delaware Valley Herpetological Society outing/meeting last Saturday (May 23rd) at the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge by the airport.

The meeting didn't start as well as we'd have liked. The speaker didn't show up, so we proceeded with the business part of the meeting (going over some changes to the bylaws) at the Cusano Environmental Education Center, and then... still no speaker.

The Refuge is familiar territory for a lot of us, though, so we launched out on a route around the top of the Impoundment.


Plenty of turtles were out basking. We got to see a really nice redbelly (Pseudemys rubriventris) and a bunch of painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) and some of the non-native red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta).

Back at the Environmental Education Center we found a tiny treat in the pond they have in the middle of the building - baby painted turtles basking in a weedy section of the pond.


I want to thank Gary Stolz, the Refuge Director, for arranging our use of the facility, and everyone who attended for making it such a good time.

We'll be taking a break for the summer and won't be meeting again until September, most likely the last Friday the 25th, when we'll be treated to a talk on envenomation by none other than Scott! Scott, my erstwhile herping buddy, is an emergency medicine physician and has combined his specialty with his love of snakes in an expertise of the effects of venomous snakebite and how to treat it.

So you've surely heard of nature walks, and probably heard of birding walks, but what about a herp walk? The concept shouldn't be all that alien to us; after all this spring I went on an amphibian walk at the Five Mile Woods in upper Bucks County to observe breeding spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer), wood frogs (Rana sylvatica), and spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum), but outside of walks targeting highly predictable herp behavior, we generally don't take groups of non-herpers out on herping trips.

So it was with some trepidation that Scott and I agreed to lead a walk in April at a large privately held property in the rolling hills west of Philadelphia. It's not that we don't want to educate people about reptiles and amphibians and try to engender some respect and appreciation for them in the general public (love might be asking too much). The problem is the fundamental unpredictability of herping. For example Scott and I spent a long and gloriously beautiful April day at the same location - perfect weather, perfect time of the year for all sorts of critters - and came up almost completely skunked. On other trips we've done fabulously, with oodles of turtles, snakes, frogs, and toads, but it was nothing we could guarantee. We didn't want to take a bunch of hopeful strangers out on a long slog in the mud to find nothing but, well, mud.

We immediately decided that the only way this could work was if we captured critters in advance of the walk. These would serve as good show and tell animals in the pre-walk lecture, and then we could release them outside at their points of capture, giving people some herp interactions and observations even if nothing presented itself on the course of the walk. We also decided to set some turtle traps in advance so that we could pull out a bunch of painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) to pass around and then let go. Painted turtles are generally pretty to look at and don't bite, making them a perfect show and tell herp for beginners.

So the day before I was out there with a lot of little containers, some cloth snake bags, and high hopes. Shoshanna, Eitan's daughter, agreed to come along to help with what is actually a really fun kind of project - bag one of everything we see.

We don't collect animals, almost as a rule. I want to skim across the question of collecting without getting stuck in a complicated, highly charged topic that often ties herpers up in angry, vitriolic knots, so suffice it to say that we usually don't catch critters for more time it takes to measure and photograph them.

That said, it's a lot of fun to catch them for a little longer, to indulge our acquisitive urges for a day. I usually don't carry snake bags, but this time I was thrilled to stuff them with a bunch of plastic takeout food containers in Shoshi's backpack and start hunting.

We got to use them right away. One of the first rocks at an we flipped at an uplands spot gave us a small garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) - perfect as a common species of the marsh, a snake that so many people see zipping away before they can get a good close look at it.

Then we struck off to a cluster of ponds, site of my first and only small disaster of the day. As a preface I should relate that Scott had been there the Friday before with his son Miles on his back. Miles is a real trooper, as is Scott to try to herp with a toddler literally and metaphorically weighing him down. Here's an earlier shot of Miles on Scott's back for reference, with Scott examining a spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata).

Scott had called me from the marsh that Friday to tell me how hard it was to catch anything; he'd spot a critter that he would usually stoop, dive, or slide to grab, but none of those actions was possible with Miles riding up top. Particularly frustrating was an absolutely huge northern watersnake (Nerodia sipedon) he had seen basking at the edge of one of the ponds.

Watersnakes are everywhere in the marsh - basking on tussocks and the banks of the ponds, poking around the reeds for frogs, skimming across the creek, and so would be a wonderfully representative species to show the people on the walk. And if you're going to show people a watersnake, do you want to show them an average, puny watersnake, or do you want to show them the grandmama of all watersnakes?

No question there, so that monster watersnake was high on my shopping list for the day. As I came in sight of the watersnake's pond I started studying the bank for the dark gray coils of the basking beast. Unfortunately it saw me before I saw it and started sliding into the water while I was still maybe ten feet away and on the other side of some willow saplings.

The snake's head start didn't stop me from trying to catch it, of course, so I charged with bull-like grace through the vegetation and over the edge of the bank. I still missed the snake - indeed a monster snake that certainly would have made me pay for the privilege of catching it. To add injury to insult, I underestimated the slope of the bottom of the pond and my second step flooded my left hip wader.

To assuage my wounded ego I caught a newt in the shallows. I know, there is no real honor in catching one of the most common, slowest, clumsiest amphibians of the marsh, but we needed one for the next day. I didn't have the container, so with the newt in hand I set off looking for Shoshi, who had disappeared sometime after I flooded my left hip wader.

I found her in a nearby strip of wet meadow - what might look like an overgrown field with puddles until you step into it and realize you're sinking up to your knees into a mat of water and dead grass.

"Shoshi!" I called, trying to feel proud of myself (it's hard to feel proud of myself when I have a soggy sock), "I caught a newt! Can you hand me a container?"

"I would," she replied, "but I don't have a free hand. I'd have to put down one of the turtles!"

Shoshi was holding two spotted turtles that she had caught basking in one of the puddles, and as soon as she handed one to me she spotted another and picked it up too.

Beginner's luck? Not quite. Shoshi is Eitan's daughter, and she's been catching turtles with her dad her whole life. She explained that she just walks very slowly and carefully studies the water for heads or any sign of motion - ripples, vegetation waving out of rhythm with the wind. She makes it sound simple, but that kind of careful, patient attention to the habitat detail takes some practice and skill, certainly more skill than catching a newt in a few inches of water.

I put my pathetic little newt in a container with some water from one of the puddles and got to work photographing, measuring, and otherwise processing the turtles before letting them go again.

It took us two tried to bag a green frog (Rana clamitans) in a nearby weedy puddle. It had jumped in and escaped into the mud earlier, but on our second try we just kept feeling around the bottom until we flushed it back out.

Now it was time to set traps, one in each of two of the ponds that are full of easily trapped painted turtles, and from there we circled back to a building where we were storing the critters for the next day.

There's a lovely piece of metal on the hillside near the building, and the property's caretaker had commented to me the week before that he finds snakes underneath it when he moves it to mow the grass. I had checked the week before and had found nothing but some rodent burrows leading back into the hillside. This time, however, I was greeted with one of the most beautiful sights in Pennsylvania herping, the crimson and gray coils of a young milksnake (Lampropeltis triangulum)!

Dig that red eye.

Yes, this is the same species of snake I so obsessively hunt in the city of Philadelphia. Can you see why?

It was an absolute pleasure to handle - no thrashing, no biting, no musking or pooping. It just held onto my hand and flicked its tongue around patiently. I lingered with it a moment before bagging it, sure it would be a hit the next day.

From there Shoshi and I headed down the creek in a canoe to set some more traps (hoping for more spotted turtles). We snatched a small basking painted turtle and caught one love-struck American toad (Bufo americanus) trilling away next to the creek. This is also when I tried out carrying a snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) in a canoe (see the May 5th post), and we quickly decided it wouldn't work.

Sunday was the big day, and we started the morning by making the rounds to catch more critters for the talk and walk. The big catch was another snapping turtle, this one smaller than the one from the canoe. Jen spotted it in the shallows of one of the ponds, and Scott pulled it out of the mud.

Now what? The pond is a five minute walk from the building where we were storing critters and where we'd be doing the talk, and I pointed out the trickiness of carrying a resisting snapping turtle that far. I suggested bagging the turtle for the walk back, and soon we were crouching on the ground, trying to hold a pillowcase open with a snake hook while shoving in an ornery, long-clawed chunk of turtle.

That's when the snapping turtle bit Scott.

You might be thinking, 'how does someone get bitten by a bagged turtle?' Well, Scott's thinking was that he wanted to locate the turtle's head in the pillowcase before dropping it in his backpack, but I stared at him with bug-eyed disbelief as he felt around the turtle with his bare hand, and then SNAP!, the turtle caught his finger. He got it out pretty quickly, but even with the bag between the turtle's jaws and his finger it drew blood and, according to Scott, felt like getting his finger slammed in steel door.

After that the day only got better (how could it not?).

Here is a shot of me talking through the slides of the site and some photos of the resident herpetefauna.

Scott and Jen walked the actual live animals around (I added a pet stinkpot - Sternotherus oderatus and a baby watersnake from Cobbs Creek to the effort), and soon it was time to very carefully re-bag the snapping turtle (we had kept it in the sink) and head outside.

I quickly released the gartersnake by its rock and the milksnake by its metal home. We set off on a course to the ponds, releasing newts, frogs,


and turtles,


and doing the same with maybe a dozen painted turtles we found in the two traps.

Have I mentioned how hot it was? This was that freak weekend in April when instead of the pleasant, sunny weather of spring we got nineties better suited to August. We didn't expect much of anything to be active by the 1pm scheduled walk time, but we were pleasantly surprised by the amphibian action.

American toads were having a small party in the shallows where I had caught the newt. We heard the trilling from far away, but close-up we saw them hopping around, some on their own, some hopping in pairs.

One of the walkers spotted what he thought was a small toad a few yards past the toads and came up with this little spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer), a species we had missed in our collecting effort.

We had also failed to catch any bull frogs (Rana catesbeiana), but this one basking on a lilly pad couldn't have looked more perfectly froggy if we had set up the scene in a studio.

We wound up the way a nature walk in a marsh should - slogging through mud and water.



I was a little surprised when more than one person asked how often we did this kind of presentation and herp walk, since this was the first we had ever done.

I wasn't planning on much herping Saturday morning (May 16th), but on my standard Woodlands Cemetery weekend jog I flipped two adult female brown snakes (Storeria dekayi). That was enough of a hint from the herping gods to send me out to Mt. Moriah.

I hadn't expected a warm, misty morning to yield many snakes hiding under cover objects, but obviously the snakes knew something I didn't.

Herpers operate under a lot of assumptions that we too often treat as hard and fast rules. For example we often assume that snakes use cover objects for heat and/or moisture: cover objects to transfer heat from the sun without forcing snakes to bask in the open, and the objects preserve moisture in relatively dry settings. For both these reasons a wet, almost foggy morning should yield little under cover - no sun to heat the cover object, and no advantage of avoiding dessication.





The brown snakes of the Mt. Moriah cemetery disagreed along with their sisters in the Woodlands. I found six adult females along with an adult male and a yearling female. Almost all the adult females looked plump and were getting ready to shed their skins, and all of them were under trash. I'm pretty sure they were all pregnant, but I don't think they're due for another month and half. So, for the next few weeks we should be catching plump female brown snakes.




I also found this gartersnake (Thamnophis sirtalis), that held still long enough for me to get some photos. Of course it was chewing on my hand, but a foot-long gartersnake doesn't do much damage, and I love how they flatten out to flash that toothpaste blue-green in between their scales.