As an update to this post, here's the full official meeting notice:

Meeting Notice: Greater Philadelphia Herpetological Society - Fri., September 26, 2008 7:30PM
Location: Shriner's Hospital - 3551 N. Broad Street (between Venango and Tioga Streets in Philadelphia)

The Greater Philadelphia Herpetological Society (GPHS) will present a free illustrated talk by Peter Warny of the New York State Museum, entitled Reptile Ecology and Conservation Projects Along the East Coast. The talk will be given on Friday, the 26th of September, at the Shriners’ Hospital, 3551 N. Broad Street (east side), between Venango and Tioga Streets, in Philadelphia. It will start at 8 PM, following a brief business meeting. Peter Warny will discuss herpetological conservation projects from over the past five years and environmental issues from Maine to Florida. Topics include prescribed burning, dam removal, and wetland mitigation, along with radio-tracking of several species of snakes and turtles. His extensive reptile research and conservation projects have involved him with the Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society, and other conservation groups.

The GPHS, recently organized, plans to become an active herpetological organization in the area, with meetings, field trips, and publications. Its mailing address is Greater Philadelphia Herpetological Society c/o the Delaware County Institute of Science, 11 Veterans’ Square, Media, PA 19063.

The GPHS is a group of both professional and amateur herpetologists dedicated to Conservation, Information, and Education. Membership is open to all people who agree with the aims of the society, provided that they live in the Greater Philadelphia Area. For this purpose, the Greater Philadelphia Area is defined as anything between latitudes 90° N and 90° S and between the Prime Meridian and the International Date Line.



For media use only: Further information may be obtained from Dr Robert C. Feuer, President, GPHS, 102 S. New Ardmore Avenue, Broomall, PA 19008, 610-353-1223. Email: feuerecol@sigmaxi.net

I'm part of a group re-starting the Philadelphia Herpetological Society, and we're finally having our first public meeting this Friday, the 26th. Due to some confusion around the organizational status, we're calling it the "Greater" Philadelphia Herpetological Society for now. Here's the lowdown on the meeting:

Shriners' Hospital, 3551 N. Broad St. (East side between Venango & Tioga Streets). Park inside and identify yourself as going to the Greater PHS. Admission is free but we will be passing the hat to cover the speaker's honorarium and the "donation" to the hospital. The meeting is at 7:30.

I've emailed everyone I can think of about it, but I'm sure I've forgotten someone, and I'm sure there are plenty of herp-interested people in the area who read the blog but haven't contacted me. Please feel free to drop me an email (billysbrown[at]gmail[dot]com) if you have any questions about the Society or the meeting.

I've been traveling a lot lately and haven't had a heck of a lot of time for local herping (or for writing about herping), so I was glad to grab an hour on Wednesday to search for brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) at the Mill Creek Farm, an urban agriculture project at 49th and Brown in West Philly.

I've been looking for a brown snake population that's both accessible and safe from destructive development for my little study (see below for a post on the study), and the Mill Creek Farm is perfect. What makes it even better is that they already do a lot of programming with local school children, a component I hope to bring into the study in the near future. They've been incredibly accommodating and I owe them a huge thanks for the access they've granted me. The icing on the cake, to use a completely inappropriate metaphor, is the produce they grow and sell. Even if I don't find any snakes, I take home delicious tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and whatever else I can't resist buying (luckily I'm limited by how much I can carry home on my bike).

I had looked once before and found no snakes, but on Wednesday afternoon I was finally able to get started. I uncovered three snakes: two under a board, and one under an old rug behind the bee hives. Working inches away from active bee hives with dozens of honeybees buzzing around me made me a little jittery. I know that honeybees are extremely docile and unlikely to sting unless harassed, but I still imagined myself tripping into one of the hives and pissing off a few thousand stinger-wielding bees. (of course I've also bought the honey - delicious)



Once I caught the snakes I wrote down the basic information (temperature, time, coordinates, etc.) and took photos of the snakes, using a homemade squeeze box to keep them still and flat with a small ruler in the frame. At home I was able to use a computer program to come up with their lengths, a heck of a lot easier and probably less traumatic than trying to stretch a wriggling little snake out against a ruler.




The part that was traumatic for the snakes was the marking. I'm using a small cautery pen to brand the scales under the tail - I scar a unique combination of scales on each snake so that I can easily ID them when they're caught again. Here's the article describing the basic method. It takes just a second and it doesn't hurt them in the long run, but I still wince when I hear the hiss and smell that little bit of burning keratin (like burning hair).

By now we’re all familiar with my love of brown snakes (Storeria dekayi). I’ve been having a good time catching them around West Philly and taking photos and notes as I go, but I haven’t been too systematic about it.

Lately I’ve started thinking more about what I could actually learn about the snakes I hunt for and ogle on a regular basis. About a year ago I was corresponding with a herpetologist about something else, and when I started asking about what is known about urban herp populations, I learned the answer is, not much.

Even more recently a couple people have remarked that some of my observations of brown snakes could be published. I don’t agree, but it’s been dawning on me that maybe I could learn something useful about these under-studied populations.

I guess there’s not much direct conservation value to studying brown snakes in an urban setting. Brown snakes aren’t endangered, so there’s no dire need for information on how to preserve them. Still they present some interesting population dynamics questions: they seem to be much more abundant than in wild populations, why? Most interesting to me, are we looking at one big population spread across West Philly (and presumably connecting with corridors out of the city along the Schuylkill and Delaware) or a patchwork of little populations, isolated from each other by roads and doomed to blink out one by one over the next hundred years or so.

So, I’ve been thinking I’d like to do a basic study on some of our brown snakes. I won’t get into all the gory details right now, but I’ve bought (and rigged up) the basic equipment and have managed to find a good place to do the study.

I managed to get out last Saturday (August 30^th) for a morning and didn’t find any snakes (a little bit of a surprise), but I look forward to getting out again soon and getting started.

On other news, I flipped a garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) the next day (Sunday, August 31^st) in the Woodlands Cemetery on my morning run. It was under a log that I’ve looked under a hundred times and never found anything but really big night crawlers and even bigger slugs. This time the slugs and the worms were there, but so was the ten inch garter, probably a yearling. I do wonder if it’s related to the big female I see in the same area.

I spent the past week on a herping vacation to North Carolina. I think I’ll save it for the winter posts when I need to forget the snow and ice outside, but I’ll close with a teaser shot of me with what is surely the most awesome (there's no better word) kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula) I’ve ever seen.

Sometimes everything works out like I plan. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does I feel like a genius, exclaiming to all the rocks and trees how heroic a herper I am (never mind the failed trips that far outnumber the triumphant successes).

Jen and I were up at my cousin’s cabin in the mountains of Upstate PA, enjoying an overnight trip of lots of laziness, good and inexpensive ice cream, and a little canoeing. Of course I can’t go anywhere without scouting the place out on Google Earth beforehand, so I’d done my research, locating a nice, rocky, south-facing ridge close to the cabin, complete with a handy right-of-way for access.

The weather started off misty and cool that morning (good funeral weather maybe), but I reminded myself that it would probably clear soon, and that either way overcast skies aren’t necessarily bad for finding basking snakes.

The hike up the mountain ridge went pretty smoothly, fueled by an abundance of wild berries. I can’t say I moved as fast as I’m capable of moving, but my slow advance through the thickets of blueberries and blackberries was delicious. I stuffed my face as I went, thinking to myself, “gosh, I bet the bears love this place.”

[Note that I had a hard time photographing berries, the problem being that I kept eating most of the berries off the really photogenic bushes before I could get out the camera.]

Not too long after that prophetic inkling, I raised my head (the closer the distance from berries to mouth, the better) and heard a mighty crashing noise just as I saw a black bear take off away from me, running with shocking speed, albeit completely lacking grace as it rocketed through the underbrush into the tree line at the edge of the right-of-way and beyond.

This has been my experience with black bears. I usually scare the living daylights out of them (humans hunt them, of course), so there’s no need to be too scared of them, but usually no chance to take a photo either.

What actually did concern me a little was a heavy rustling and crashing-about deep behind a wall of bushes to my other side, maybe thirty feet away. I’m pretty sure another bear, maybe a cub, was in there and staying put, however much a clapped and yelled to try to flush it. I scampered up the trail, conscious that however timid bears usually are, I didn’t want to stick around between a bear and her cub.

I did get a photo of bear poop (not technically in the woods, come to think of it) as proof of what I’d seen, and that they’d been feasting on the berries, judging by all the seeds.



I saw four such piles of scat on my way up the ridge, and even though I must have looked like an idiot clapping and hollering each time I went into a blind curve in the path, I kept at it, determined not to surprise a bear too close for comfort.

Here's more bear evidence - a rotting log split open for grubs:

So, bears behind me, I scrambled over unruly piles of boulders, more rock-climbing than hiking at points, and the sun did come out when I was somewhere in the boulders. Here are some shots of the terrain.

As I got to the top I noted the nice small cliffs and outcroppings around me, both in the right of way and to either side. The ones to either side were actually a little nerve-wracking to approach, since I had to wade through blueberry bushes that could quite easily have been hiding rattlers from my view. Timbers tend not to strike unless you’re right on top of them, but for a few stretches I had no way of telling where they were until I put my foot down.

I did not get tagged, thankfully, but I did finally find the right little ledge. I can’t say I spotted the snake; rather I heard the frantic buzzing of a scared rattler, looked to my left, and there she was.

I whipped out the camera and got in a few pictures and a quick video (here it is so you can hear what their rattling sounds like).

I backed up a few steps to give her some space. I didn’t want to ruin her day of basking. Dig her fat rear end in the photos below, consistent with her about to give birth. This is the right time of year for that too, and her basking in the open is also what you’d expect of a gravid timber rattler, 'cooking her babies' to use the elegant herper expression.

As I took out my GPS unit to record the location and my thermometer to check the air temperature (high 60s), I saw her pause, make a slow U-turn, and return to her original spot. I hadn’t backed all that far off where I’d been when I first spotted her (from less than ten feet away to maybe fifteen feet away), but apparently that was enough room for her. We were in plain sight of each other – no missing me from her perspective – so I figure she didn’t care about me standing there as long as I respected her personal space and didn’t make any fast moves.

Here’s a series of shots showing her retreat and then return to her basking spot.

I could have stayed there all day. There’s something magical about a big timber rattler, and it’s so rare that any snake just sits there in the open and lets you look at it. It seemed like a waste of the experience to leave, but I was already late to rejoin Jen and our cousins. So, I bid farewell to the majestic mother-to-be and headed back down the mountain.

My Philly milk snake (Lampropeltis triangulum) obsession reared its ugly, time-vacuuming head on Sunday (August 17th). Newly revived and as strong as ever, it vetoed alternative plans to hunt copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix) in Chester County or turtles in Bucks County. I was compelled, instead, to return to Roxborough and hack my way through chest-high weeds and grass and look for cover to flip.

I made the most of it; it was a beautiful day and I rode out on my bicycle. I commute to work most days by bicycle, so the contrast of just sailing along MLK Drive with no traffic to dodge and no traffic lights to stop for was delicious. One other cycler did ask why I had a potato rake strapped to my bike, and I matter-of-factly explained that I had been looking for snakes that morning.

I don't have to tell you I found no snakes, but I did reorganize some old boards and flat rocks I found in piles here and there, stupid in that scouting and spreading out artificial cover is winter work, something you do when the weathers no good for catching anything anywhere, and when the vegetation is dead and has been beaten down a bit already by the weather.

Luckily my schedule doesn't allow any more urban milk snake trips the rest of the season, right?

• I would like to trap more intensively for turtles in Cobbs Creek. I put the trap in a couple days last weekend, but only came up with fish. I've invested in the best bait out there - sardines in oil, so I hope for more luck this week.
  
• I'd like to check in on a copperhead den in Chester County now that the snakes should be gathering for their winter sleep.
  
• I'd like to do the same at timber rattler (Crotalus horridus) den or two in the mountains. It would be nice to see some babies joining the big, old snakes I saw this spring.
  
• I'd like to start marking brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) in West Philly for a little study idea I've been kicking around - this might be the kind of thing I can squeeze in an hour here, an hour there, but to be honest it excites me more than the pit viper hunting.
  
• Last, I've got some travel planned for the next few weekends. It's hard to contemplate in the middle of August, but that leaves a pretty limited time before autumn sweeps in and ruins everything.
  

They say it can take several tries to quit. Drug addicts often need several rounds of rehab and major life changes to break their habit. Smokers and alcoholics do fine for a while, feel great, are doing great, and then some unforeseen trigger catches them at a weak moment and they’re hooked again.

Last Sunday (August 10th) Scott and I were getting back into his car parked near the Manayunk Canal when he noticed some snake jerky next to the car. I had just tried to trap turtles for the second time that weekend with my new trap, and for the second time it had come up empty. Now that doesn’t mean much; for best results I should leave that thing in overnight and try different spots and baits, but I was still a little disappointed, not completely prepared for a shock to my emotional system.

Scott was on the phone with his wife and had just finished wrangling his toddler into the car seat when he looked down and emitted an intrigued grunt. I looked over, and he tapped his foot on the dried-up, many-times-squashed snake on the asphalt. I saw him lower his head a tad more and then cup the receiver on his cell phone (presumably still listening to his wife) and produce a slightly more excited grunt.

“What?” I said, “a brown snake?” Brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) are the most common road jerky I see in Philadelphia. Here’s a shot of brown snake jerky.



Scott bent down and held up something very different. Instead of the vaguely patterned beige of a brown snake on that stiff, two-dimensional corpse, I saw deep red blotches outlined with black on a dirty gray background. Scott had found a milksnake (Lampropeltis triangulum).


I’ve compared my herping impulses to an addiction before (and among my herping buddies I’m hardly unique in this). I’ve chosen to feed my general addiction with a steady diet of socially/ecologically constructive herping trips: some to local spots like the Manayunk Canal, and some farther away to Jersey and the mountains of Upstate PA.

I have chosen to fight what I consider to be more-harmful sub-addictions, in particular my obsession with finding milksnakes within the city limits of Philadelphia. In the spring of 2004 I found one gorgeous yearling milksnake under a completely ordinary rock on an otherwise undistinguished hillside in the Wissahickon, and I was hooked.

Of course I’m not saying I’m in as bad a shape as anyone who’s substance-addicted, but there are similarities. Over the past three years I’ve spent endless hours flipping rocks for milksnakes and finding nothing more remarkable than ringneck snakes (Diadophis punctatus – not that there’s anything wrong with a ringneck) and redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus). I’ve hacked my way through many thorny miles of Wissahickon Valley hillsides when I could have been out in way-more productive environments or finding species of interest to our state conservation agencies.

This spring, after a few notably unproductive attempts (although they were good workouts) I resolved to quit the milksnake habit. I’ve put milksnakes out of mind, and instead I’ve gone on more turtle trips, more trips out to Chester County, and a few trips into Cobbs Creek when I would have otherwise been out in the Roxborough area.

This milksnake, however, this yearling, dead-for-a-week, flattened and preserved under hundreds of rolling tires, has whetted my appetite again. I’m now thinking of laying a board line or two in the area. I’m thinking of a trip next weekend to scout the area again and flip everything in sight.

I hope I can do something else productive while I fruitlessly search for another three years. Maybe I can combine this with another project. Maybe I’ll toss the turtle trap in the water and head onto land for the morning and see what results come from each activity. No matter what, I’m hooked again.


Here are a couple turtle photos. Only one is a redbelly (Pseudemys rubriventris) - the second from the left. The rest are the introduced red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans).

On Saturday (August 9th) I did try a map turtle (Graptemys geographica) and soft-shell turtle (Apalone spinifera) trip into Upper Bucks County.

I didn’t see any turtles at all, neither swimming nor in my trap, but I did have a nice time flipping rocks on the banks of a creek up there.




This is frequently a productive way to herp, albeit for relatively common species. I usually find frogs and toads, and often some salamanders, particularly two-lines (Eurycea bislineata) and long-tails (Eurycea longicaudata). I sometimes find northern watersnakes (Nerodia sipedon), and once, many years ago in Ohio I found a queen snake (Regina septemvittata).

This time the frogs were pickerel frogs (Rana palustris)...


...and the toads were Fowlers (Bufo fowleri).


The white belly is one way to tell them apart from the American toad (Bufo americanus).
The recently transformed toadlets were everywhere:





I saw no salamanders, but I did turn up this small watersnake.

I’ve decided that the road to summer herping happiness is not asphalt or even country gravel; it is a creek full of turtles. Conventional wisdom in my circle of herping buddies is that when it gets really hot and dry, the only herping really worth your time is road cruising. As I have amply described on this blog, I have not been overwhelmed with my road cruising success. I have been tickled pink, however, by my turtling success.

Last week through Saturday looked a lot like the previous week. I was in South Jersey for work on Wednesday, so I stuck around after my last meeting and I did some dusk cruising around a great black rat snake (Pantherophis obsoleta) area. I didn’t find any (otherwise I would have decided the road to happiness indeed was a dirt road in the country), contributing to my sense that I’ve done something to offend the rat snakes and they’re all avoiding me. (If any black rat snakes are reading this, I implore you to please email me and let me know how I can make things right. I miss you.)

On Saturday Jen and I went for a walk/run in the Woodlands Cemetery, and I think we found the same garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis) as last week. It got away before I could grab it and check the tail (the difference between flipping a snake at noon when it’s warm versus 8:00am when it’s cool), but I suspect it’s the same one.

The big development, however, was the arrival of my new turtle trap (technically a Promar crab trap – looks like a cross between a snow shoe and an accordion) in the mail from Cabella’s. One of my most trusted herping mentors has been urging me to get one of these traps for a long time. It’s the kind of thing you can bait and set first thing in the morning and come back to check at the end of the morning, or the next morning if you want to be really thorough. Scott and I got some experience with this model when we helped out on some spotted turtle trapping a little over a month ago. It’s a great way to trap smaller turtles, especially in settings where it’s difficult to find and catch them by hand.

I’ve got both PA and NJ fishing licenses, and I should be clear that I’m not keeping anything we catch; this is just a tool to see what else is in there besides what we can see. As far as I can tell in Jersey I wouldn’t be breaking the law even if I did keep painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) or snappers (Chelydra serpentina), and I have yet to investigate the PA situation as thoroughly, but I think I’m safe there too.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, here’s what I did on Sunday: I drove down to another spot in Jersey that has soft shell turtles (Apalone spinifera).


I spent about an hour and a half slogging around a creek that was a lot less navigable than I had anticipated and set the trap in two successive spots in the meantime. I basically gave up on walking around and looking by hand because of the difficulty I had moving through the vines, briars, and downed trees over the creek. I saw a few stinkpots scampering about in the creek around me. A little gathering of stinkpots scattered when they saw me; I've heard of this kind of behavior before. I'm not sure if they were feeding on something that attracted them all together or if they just hang out like that sometimes, but I hope to observe more groups like this in the future. Here's an adorable little one that’s probably a yearling.



I really wasn't sure that I'd find anything at all. When we used these traps in the spotted turtle project we left about twenty traps out twenty four hours, and not all of them had turtles in the morning. However when I came back to my new trap after the first session I could see something moving around in there, so I was figuring I'd gotten lucky - at least one turtle was in there.



I pulled it out of the water and was pretty impressed to see this pile of turtles. None were the targeted soft shell, but nine turtles in an hour is scarily productive. I get the giggles just thinking about it. How many would have piled up if I’d left it a full day?

Here are some shots of the turtles.


Here's a painted turtle that looks like it once tried to steal some bait off a fish hook.


Here's a stinkpot with a hole in one of its marginal scutes. I'm not sure if this is accidental damage or a mark from a study. It's a little bigger than a notch a biologist would make, so I'm betting it's an old injury.


It was actually a little tricky processing them. I wanted to at least jot down the size and sex of each one for my tallies, but each time I opened the trap one or two tried to make it out. One stinkpot did succeed in making his or her getaway. I guess I could have hopped over and stopped it, but there was something really cute about a three-inch turtle trucking as fast as it could for the water, so I just watched.

In the second session I ONLY came up with seven. Again it was just stinkpots and painted turtles, but still a nice demonstration of the power of the turtle trap.

I did some scouting after that to check out what looked from satellite to be a nice cluster of vernal pools. I did find some nice territory on the ground, but more importantly I demonstrated why scouting is best done in the winter; you can’t see more than ten feet in front of you with all the vines and leaves this time of year. Of course some of that nice territory I found includes a nice marshy section of a stream, something I could set the trap in…

One extra tidbit: On a whim I wrote a little essay about my brown snake spot on the PIDC land that got bulldozed last fall. I sent it to the Inquirer, and they ran it as a commentary piece. Here’s the link: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/25953179.html

Every week when I go running in the Woodlands Cemetery I check the two boards that I've found around the edge of the grounds. This morning (Saturday July 26) I started slowing my pace as I approached the location of the first board, but it was gone. I doubled back to make sure I hadn't passed it by accident, but it wasn't anywhere; someone had picked it up.

This is not the first time they've done this. Board number one used to be another board (great for finding brown snakes last fall and this spring) until it disappeared, at which point board number two became board number one. I was a little miffed at its disappearance, but really I can't fault the Cemetery for taking good care of the grounds; no one else will appreciate discarded boards like I do, and the caretakers' job is to keep the place looking nice in a conventional sense.

Luckily board number two (the new board number one) was still there (perhaps because it's hidden by weeds?), and this morning I lifted it to reveal a garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis).

She looked an awful lot like one I caught there a couple times in the summer of 2006, but then a lot of the bigger garter snakes look very similar - dark muddy green background, light stripe down the back. I noticed a scar on the tail of this one, and next time I find a hefty adult female garter under that board, I'll check her for scars.

It was a relief to see her, for some reason I can't put my finger on. Maybe it's the summer doldrums; the lack of snakes is getting to me. Maybe it's because I went on two dismal Jersey road cruising trips last week and needed a success.

The first cruising trip was to the Barrens with Scott and Eitan (bad influences) for the usual Fowlers toads (Bufo fowleri), carpenter frogs (Rana virgaticeps), and one southern leopard frog (Rana utricularia) that was the best looking thing all night. Carpenter frogs, by contrast, are astonishingly ugly. I know I shouldn't say that about any animal, but with their vague dark stripes down the back and mottled muddy green background, they look like bad watercolor.

What really killed the trip for me was one of the DOR black racers we found (Coluber constrictor). It was way over on the shoulder of the road, and it was totally intact and immaculate except for the imprint of one tire smashed through its midsection, pasting it to the blacktop. Someone really swerved out of their way to kill that beautiful, utterly harmless snake, and it's hard to feel good about humanity after that. I peeled the poor guy off the road and tossed him off into the weeds. We debated why herpers tend to remove DOR animals from the road surface; I know I do it out of respect for the animal. Sure it's dead, but nothing deserves the indignity of people repeatedly running it over for sport.

The second trip was on Wednesday to Salem County, where no one ever goes, but where I'm interested in learning the terrain. I think it's got a lot of potential. My idea had been to hit the roads after the storm or before the storm, or maybe in moderate rain, but we got caught in sheets of rain and couldn't see the road, let alone any critters.

So it’s ninety-plus degrees and humid, too hot to flip anything, probably too hot to find much crawling around on the surface, and certainly too hot to spend much time walking around to see. It’s the middle of a dry spell, so even road cruising is more likely than usual to be a bust.

What’s a herper to do? How about turtling? When it’s hot enough to melt the handle on your Stumpripper, turtles are exactly where you want to be, in the water!

I’ve got big turtling plans this summer. As usual they’re probably unrealistic given my time and financial/gasoline constraints, but on Sunday morning I headed out to the Maurice River to try out one of my ideas: the hunt for the spiny softshell turtles (Apalone spinifera).

Spiny softshells, much like the common map turtles (Graptemys geographica), are an invasive exotic species in our region but don’t come from very far away. They occur naturally in Western Pennsylvania and into New England, but the ones in the Delaware Valley are apparently descended from released animals. The Maurice River in Salem and Cumberland Counties in NJ is apparently ground zero, but they’ve been seen in the Heinz NWR and Kyle’s posted photos of Bucks County, PA softshells on Field Herp Forum.

The Maurice River is easy to access and pretty shallow (especially in this dry weather) near Vineland, north of Union Lake, so I decided to get up early on Sunday (July 20th) and check it out.


This was to be a hip wader trip and not a snorkeling trip. The shallow water made me comfortable that I could get grab turtles without going under, but more important was that none of my herping buddies could make the trip with me. As much as I trust myself as a swimmer, I’m not comfortable going swimming on my own in an unfamiliar river; there have been too many stories lately of people drowning in the Delaware, Neshaminy Creek, or other local waterways.

So a little before eight in the morning I was up to my thighs in the Maurice, net in hand and scanning the bottom through my polarized sunglasses. (Polarized sunglasses are cheap and wonderful. For ten bucks you can see through most of the surface glare and watch fish, crawdads, and of course turtles underwater that you otherwise couldn’t see.). Here's some evidence of someone else (raccoon) prowling the river:


The first turtle I saw was like a dark, round rock scampering over the gravel with its head thrust out in front. Stinkpots (Sternotherus oderatus) are a lot of fun to catch. They’re slow, they don’t swim well, and as long as you keep your fingers in back of the bridge of their shell, they’re pretty harmless. I saw eight that morning. I caught some with the net and some just by reaching down and picking them up. Three got away, but here are shots of some of the ones I nabbed.





I just love the white stripes on the black faces of the younger ones.



Dig the shell damage on these two.




The number one stinkpot imitator was another exotic invasive, the glass bottle. There are a LOT of glass bottles in the Maurice River. Out of the corner of your eye, they look just like a round stinkpot, and more than once I thought I had stepped on a turtle (round, hard, a few inches across?) but reached down to pull up yet another glass bottle.


A sand-filled and flattened two-liter plastic bottle also fooled me. There were just enough ripples on the surface to keep me from getting a clear picture of it, and it looked just like a large turtle with its head just peeking out. I had to net it to convince myself that it was indeed trash and not a softshell.

Softshell turtles are supposed to love to bask. When they’re not basking and not swimming, they’re supposed to burrow into the sand or mud, occasionally sticking their heads up at the end of their long necks and taking a breath through their snorkel-like noses, often without budging the rest of their bodies from under the sand. I used to see them swimming and basking pretty often when I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, so I know I’d recognize them if I could lay my eyes on any.

I didn’t see any basking, and as much as I scanned the sand for any indication of a hiding turtle, I saw none. I talked to some kayakers who passed me and to a fisherman (who reported a snapper so big he “couldn’t bear hug it if I wanted to.”), but neither reported seeing softshell turtles on that stretch of the river.

I can still have fun without softshell turtles. Stinkpots are always a good time, and I did see one more turtle species. I was standing near the shore, studying yet another patch of gravel under the water, when out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a small boulder with legs. I looked straight at it, and two beady little eyes in a head the size of my fist looked right back at me.

It was a common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina), and it was a big one. It made a move for the deeper water behind me, but before I could think I had swung my net down to block it. Too often I think before acting, and I’m glad that for once my herping reflexes took over in time. Sand and mud swirled up from the bottom, obscuring my view of the dodging dark mass in the water, but I kept guessing right and blocking, corralling it until I was directly in front of it and able to scoop it into my net.


I took a breath and stared down at my still-immersed net, full of a 20+ pound scared and angry snapper digging at the webbing with its powerful claws. That’s about when I started thinking: (thought #1) How the hell am I going to get that thing out of the net?



This was no stinkpot, and even those little guys demanded enough respect for me to handle them cautiously from the back. Moreover there was no good way to photograph the turtle once I got it out. The riverbank in front of me was just a short patch of moss before a dense wall of bushes and vines. The turtle wouldn’t just sit there in the water to pose, and there was no one to take the dramatic shot of me hoisting the glorious beast out of the water before its release.

So, holding onto the net handle with my left hand, I took out my camera, strung its strap over my neck, and tossed my backpack to the bank. I took hold of the turtle’s tail with my right hand, let the handle fall, and started pulling the webbing away from its back feet with my left hand. I’ll note that I never lifted it more than halfway out of the water by its tail. You can seriously injure a snapper by lifting it by its tail, so if you do need to lift a snapper into the air, make sure to grab it by its hind feet, the back of its shell, or some combination. I figured that with at least half of its weight (including the all-important snapping mouth) still in the water, it was okay to steady it by its tail as I worked.



Of course if you like having ten fingers, keep them towards the back of the turtle. I had to remind myself of this once I had freed the back feet and I worked towards the head. I kept my grip on the tail with my right hand and grabbed the net handle again with my left. As I pulled the net away the turtle gradually let go, and after a few photos that did not turn out very well, I released it and felt it crawl over my feet, between them (that'll make me hold my breath every time), and then behind me into the deeper channel of the river.