About a week ago it hit me that I haven't paid much attention to my favorite cemeteries for a long time - about a couple weeks, with only one trip to Mt. Moriah in the previous month. I guess this has to do with my injuring my knee, but I'm quite capable of walking around at this point, so on Saturday (June 27th) I made a point of heading over to the Mt. Moriah Cemetery to look around.

The one trip I had made was surprisingly unsuccessful - a morning trip that only turned up a garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis), which was nice, but it wasn't a brown snake (Storeria dekayi).

I was greeted by walls of green everywhere on that trip - always astounding to see how much the vegetation can grow in such a short time. I had trouble finding some cover objects that had been sitting out in plain sight two weeks before. On this weekend's trip I had the same reaction. All our recent rain has fueled another round of green. Dig these photos of the cemetery:




Here's a groundhog that didn't seem to notice me until I got relatively close, but still not quite close enough for a good photo:


This trip did turn up some brown snakes. I'm still kicking myself over two I let get away; I'm supposed to be good at this by now. My error was in lifting a rock with one hand while still holding my potato rake with the other, so that it wasn't free to grab the two plump females before they could disappear into the high grass. When you're looking under cover, even if it's the 100th object you've lifted, make sure you have one hand free.

Here's a nice little one that I did manage to get my hands on, and for some reason Blogger insists on rotating it 90 degrees:



I was happy to find the four brown snakes, but more interesting to me were the four garters that I saw. I only saw one in two years of herping the cemetery, but this season they're everywhere. I should start marking them too. I'm not sure why I'm seeing more - it could be random luck, it could be that the wet year is encouraging them to come up from Cobbs Creek, it could be a good year for the night crawlers, who knows.

Like all good garter snakes they gaped and bit with vigor, smearing me with feces and musk so I could smell them for a day after.

The other cemetery I frequent is the Woodlands, between the tracks along the Schuylkill and where the trolleys go underground around 40th and Baltimore. I run there (or ran) weekly, and each time I'm there I stop and flip cover for brown snakes. I've been seeing them pretty consistently, so on Sunday, still sidelined from running, I decided to go on a walk there instead, and this time with a camera to snap some photos of those brown snake regulars.

Of course I didn't see any to photograph, but I did come across a deer. This is interesting because up until recently (I forget if it was last year or the year before) there was a stable little herd living back there. They were quite pretty, and it was fun to spook them on my runs. Still it was not a good place for deer, and as they multiplied I was sure they'd strip the cemetery of all leafy vegetation and at some point crash through a windshield on University Ave. Apparently the cemetery management agreed and culled the deer. I had heard rumors it was going to happen, and then one morning there were no deer.

This doe was oddly tame (just like her predecessors). I'm used to deer fleeing as soon as they see me, but she kept watching me from about thirty feet away. I worry that someone is feeding her - a setup for the whole cycle to repeat itself.

I've written several times about our herping at a large, privately held marsh to the west of Philadelphia, in the piedmont landscape of farms, forests, and (increasingly) McMansion subdivisions. I would thank the landowners by name if I felt comfortable letting on to where the site is. Scott and I have felt incredibly lucky to be involved in the conservation of such wonderful habitat.

So what exactly have we been doing to earn our keep? Well, we've been generally herping the site, recording what we see and when, getting a feel for the herpetological biodiversity of the property. We've also been in touch with the PA Herp Atlas Project and, with some guidance from Tim Maret, who runs the Atlas Project, we have paid special attention to spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata).

Now, spotted turtles are considered a special find wherever you are, but in Pennsylvania they seem to be harder to find than elsewhere in our region. Last year we found all of four at the site, and that was in a lot of hours of searching plus a trapping day with Tim and one of his volunteers. By the end of the season Scott and I were scratching our heads and wondering what we were doing wrong. Maybe the population was just less dense than we were used to seeing.

This year started slowly as well. Scott caught one at the end of March, about when things get rocking in South Jersey, for example. but that was it. We put in some really intensive effort on some of what we thought were absolutely PERFECT days (sunny, air temps in the 60s, water cooler than that) and came up totally skunked. It was the kind of herping that makes you want to take up bird watching, but we're stubborn even if we're not too bright, and eventually we started getting better results.

In particular the season seemed to turn on Earthday weekend. Shoshi picked up three basking turtles like they were just chilling there waiting for her, and then the next day Scott found a half dozen crawling around at high temperatures (high 80s) in the middle of the afternoon.

May rocked, and by the middle of June our totals had hit about 35, and not a single recapture among them. We were concentrating on one section, maybe a couple acres, but still finding them in other sections when we tried.

As we examined turtle after turtle, measuring, photographing, and then organizing all the notes and reviewing photographs of turtle after turtle, each in an identical position, but, because of the consistent positions, easily notably different from all the others, with its own scars, spot patterns, and texture, we felt a growing sense of familiarity. These weren't just anonymous turtles in yet another vernal pool explored, these were individuals we were getting to know, in a community of turtles we were learning a little better with each additional turtle we found. I suppose this is a joy of proper field biology that we dilettantes miss out on, a sort of meditative immersion in the world of the animals you're studying. I enjoy it immensely, whether with brown snakes or spotted turtles, and I hope to continue these projects over the coming years.

In general, the turtles at this site are not pretty. See the NJ road cruising post below for an example of a beautiful spotted turtle, smooth and black with bright yellow spots. These, by contrast, were often extremely rough, rugose with highly sculpted scutes, and often with barely any spots at all.

That rough texture is a sign of youth in spotted turtles. All turtles (as far as I know) add a new layer of keratin (the substance that makes up our hair and nails) to the base of their scutes each year, but over time they get worn away or flake off. So, for some species such as spotted turtles (box turtles too), a rough turtle is usually a young turtle. That guideline correlated well with other features of aging. The smoothest turtles were usually the ones with other scars and shell damage, and no small turtles were smooth.

I think the season is pretty much over at this point - not because the turtles have necessarily stopped moving (they might estivate - summer version of hibernate - if it gets too dry), but because the vegetation is too tall and thick for us to see them easily. So now it's time for a spotted turtle review!

First, here's the first turtle of the season, a really rough one. Note the lack of spots. This plain, rough turtle looks a decent amount like a bog turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii), but on closer examination was definitely a spotted turtle:

Let's go in increasing order of apparent age from here. So, first up, the cutest turtle in the world!




Here's another youngster, maybe three years old?


...and another, a little older yet, maybe seven or eight years (based on counting the layers of the scutes, or annuli)? Note that this turtle is still not full grown. It also has an irregular scute on its back:



Here's another young one, what I'd call full grown but with a little more growth left:

...and another:


Those rough scutes are starting to wear away on this one:



Old man:




This one is probably really old, worn smooth and shiny:


Old as dirt:


Another turtle geezer:


I'll wrap up with what I think is a cute series. I know it might be anthropomorphizing to write that individual turtles have distinct personalities, but I'll go out on a limb and suggest it. Here are four turtles showing ranging from shy:




...to a little less shy:
...to a little feisty:
...fightin' mad:

Readers of this blog will already know that I am not a fan of road cruising. Driving back and forth on roads at night hardly strikes me as a way to get in touch with nature; it's perhaps an efficient way to find herps, but finding a critter on blacktop or gravel in the beam of your headlight is like finding it in the middle of a parking lot, a surface that could be in front of a Walmart or next to City Hall. Where's the forest? Where's the marsh? If it's a ratsnake, where's the tree branch or the ledge, the patch of sunlight on leaf litter in the forest (not that I haven't resorted to cruising for ratsnakes in my more desperate moments)? If it's a snapping turtle crossing the road, where's the mud or the image of the head and top of the shell breaking the water, that moment when you look down in the water and realize that no, that's not a rock?

But I hurt my knee on that grand timber rattler trip, and now I can't go hiking for a little while. Road cruising might suck, but it beats sitting at home.

Luckily in late spring/early summer we have more options than just evening road cruising for snakes. Morning road cruising for turtles is way more interesting, especially when you're checking roads through marshes for nesting diamondback terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin).

There are a few weeks in early June that the dry land of the great state of New Jersey hosts some of the most beautiful turtles in the world. They're out there in the marshes the whole time, bobbing around with the tides, munching on crabs and mussels, basking when they get the chance, but we can't get to them.

That's probably for the best. Terrapins don't do very well on land, or more specifically they don't do well around cars. Female terrapins get massacred up and down the coastline of the eastern and Southern United States as they hike around, looking for the right patch of dirt to dig into. For more information on terrapins and their conservation challenges, check out the Wetlands Institute's terrapin conservation page.

All of this is not meant to suggest that we're taking advantage of a bad situation, but we spent the morning of June 5th driving around southern coastal New Jersey (I think we covered at least three counties) looking for terrapins.

Early on we encountered this pretty little male spotted turtle (Clemmys guttata) in a freshwater flooded woods island in brackish marshlands.

And on another road this little snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina), who didn't snap at all (another one later in the day certainly did), but looked thoroughly freaked out.


Soon thereafter we helped this chunky female box turtle (Terrapene carolina) cross the street in a somewhat suburban area. I wonder if she was on her way to nest. As a little reminder, always remember to take the turtle across the street in the direction it's heading. If you move it back the way it was coming from, it'll try to cross again.




The thing was, we weren't seeing any terrapins. I kept trying new roads in new sections of marsh, and all we saw were more turtles of other species like this mud turtle (Kinosternon subrubrum)


...and this painted turtle (Chrysemys picta)


...and lots of birds. We see Canada geese all the time, but Jen adores them, and I do find them entertaining sometimes. Here's a geese with goslings fleeing from the car.


I should mention the crabs - little critters that just for a second make you think you're seeing a reptile, maybe a super fast turtle.

Jen also enjoyed the mammals. There's a rabbit back there by the edge of the grass:



Too often I flip just one more board (or check one more ledge, or in this case check one more road), then one more, then one more, ad infinitum and burn through time I should have spent doing anything else. I should know better, but this time I decided to take one more sweep down a road we started off on.

It's these rare times I find something on that time-wasting 'last' pass that keeps me going through all the failures. Check out this big girl:


We also passed this one nesting. We took a quick shot and headed back to Philadelphia:

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.