I like to throw the term 'mystery' around a lot to indicate I don't know what kind of critter I'm looking at. For example when I say 'mystery frog' I usually mean some kind of frog that jumped in the water before I could get a good look at it. When I say 'mystery turtle' I'm usually talking about the distant basking turtle that slides in before you can get a good look.

In this case I know what kind of turtle this is (Red-eared slider - R.E.S. - Trachemys scripta), but by 'mystery turtle' I mean I am mystified by its location. I took this photo (sorry for the gory DOR shot - in this case I'd call it 'road pizza') half a block from my apartment building in West Philly, far from any natural body of water it could have called home.




I saw it just before dawn on Friday as I was riding my bike to the Y for a pre-work swim. I was in a rush to get into the pool and expected better light once the sun was above the horizon, so, figuring it wasn't going anywhere fast, I took the photo on the way home.

Could it have been a pet? RES are native to the middle part of our country, but they are frequently kept as pets and too-frequently released into the wild. A lot (I'd bet the vast majority) of the former pets probably die, but enough have hung on to establish breeding populations in Philadelphia's waterways to possibly threaten some of our native species. In this case it was miles from the nearest likely body of water, though. It must have been a pet.

I suspect I know whose pet it was. It was ours.

Of course if it had escaped from our apartment I would have known more certainly, but that's not what I mean (and we don't have any turtles). Our building is blessed with a huge garden space on the roof of our one-story parking garage. The Upper Garden, as we call it, actually has a duck pond in the middle of it. Over the years it had become highly eutrophied, loaded with nutrients that kicked off chocking algae blooms, turning the water to the consistency of spinach souffle - yum.

Upper Garden, showing pre-mucked out pond and turtle DOR location

Early this spring a couple neighbors and I finally decided to clean out the pond (our management has shown a high level of indifference to the Upper Garden - great in that it lets us garden the space how we see fit, which is why I have an enormous vegetable garden in the middle of a high city), employing a rented pump, shovels, and buckets to empty it of about 20,000 gallons of water and muck. Then one of the building's plumbers took over. It turns out the guy is a backyard pond enthusiast, and pretty soon our duck pond was hosting a range of aquatic plants and a school of goldfish. It was really gratifying to have our hard work pay off to the point that an expert wanted to take it from there and make a real pond out of our former muck pit.

I wasn't happy, though, when he tossed in a RES. I was thinking basic husbandry thoughts like, 'so, who is going to feed the turtle? What do we do in the winter - who is going to take it in to hibernate?'

I hadn't imagined that the turtle might somehow get out of the pond, cross the grass to a section of the edge of the Upper Garden with a fence that a turtle could fit under, tumble over the side onto the sidewalk, and then walk into Pine Street to get mashed into the asphalt. But it's been a few days since we've actually seen the pond turtle, so now I'm really wondering if the mystery turtle is ours. I guess if we see the pond turtle again we'll know who the mystery turtle isn't, but if we don't...?

Check out page 24 of the latest issue of Grid.

I finally wrote about my Philly milksnake (Lampropeltis triangulum) obsession. The article features a photo of a gorgeous Valley Forge milk taken by local herper Dave Fitzpatrick.

Sometimes I forget that most people don't know what 'DOR' means. Indeed why should normal people need a term to refer specifically to animals that are 'Dead On the Road?' I suppose it implies searching for creatures that would be, by contrast, alive on the road, which I figure only herpers do.

However wrenching it can be to see a beautiful creature killed by accident, DOR isn't completely a bad thing. It's terrible for the animal, of course, and the cumulative effects of 'road mortality' can indeed be a major threat to populations of snakes, turtles, and other animals, but you can still learn a lot from a DOR herp: namely that the species occurs where you found the corpse, and that it was moving from some point A to another point B (divided by the road) near in time to when you found it.

On Sunday I knew I wouldn't get to ride my bike to work for a few days, so I decided to go out for a nice ride along the Schuylkill. On the way I figured it couldn't hurt to do some herping, so I checked out a large vacant field that I first herped for brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) in 2006. A lot has happened in the six years since (dear lord, this makes me feel old), including development to a section of neighboring lot where I suspected the brown snake population largely hibernated, but the place looked pretty similar. 



It was still overgrown with weeds, except where horses kept the vegetation cropped. These are horses that belong to some of Philadelphia's black cowboys, locals who you'll sometimes see roaming the streets of West Philly in the saddle and giving rides to local kids.















I found a tree of heaven growing through the same tire as before.

I also found some wild cherries (I think these are chokecherries) within reach (I do love wild fruit. It feels like such a bonus to an already fun activity).

I found no brown snakes, but then on ride back out on Parkside to make my way down to the river, I found the unfortunate gal I started the post with.

Of course then I had to stop and check out the Centennial and Concourse Lakes in Fairmount Park, turning up a young bull frog (Lithobates catesbeiana) under a log.




On my actual ride I kept an eye open for turtles in the river. I include this crappy photo of crappy (invasive descendents of released pets) red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta) only to make a point about how impressively wary turtles can be. I took the photo from the Falls Bridge, well above their basking perches. Hordes of other cyclists and pedestrians were passing along that bridge that morning, but somehow my stopping for a few seconds was enough to signal danger to them, and they all jumped in before I could zoom in.

[Note to readers - I am back from vacation. Enjoy the photos. Thanks for your patience.]

Sometimes I find exactly what I'm looking for and it makes me feel incredibly smart and highly skilled. Of course a more sober analysis would balance the account with all the times I don't find what I'm looking for and I blame it on bad luck or the ill will of the herping gods (rather than anything wrong with me), but I'll stick with feeling smart and skilled.

On Sunday I headed off on a cross-state work trip. One of the aspects of my job that I enjoy is that it takes me all over our beautiful state, particularly across the mountainous middle section that all Philadelphians should be embarrassed not to enjoy more often. To be perfectly clear, I do not go out of my way to go herping on the public's dime, but I frequently end up driving right through a state or national forest or state game land, or I end up finishing a work-related meeting at, say, 4pm, and realize I am an extremely short distance away from a neat trail head. Some traveling bureaucrats might drive a few miles to get to somewhere to eat; I tend to eat in my hotel room and drive the few miles for somewhere to hike and herp.

In this case I was picking up one of my staff who happened to be camping at a park in Northeast PA along the route to Erie (and points in between) where we were heading. I simply arrived a couple hours early and went for a hike myself in an adjacent State Game Land.

Here's the road.

Here's the adjacent creek.

 I flipped rocks as I went, revealing some of the omnipresent redback salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) as well as some mountain dusky salamanders (Desmognathus ochrophaeus). This might be my least favorite herp genus, not because there's anything wrong with the animals, but because I (and lots of other people) find them confusing to identify. In contrast to the southern Appalachians, where you'll have multiple dusky species that look very similar to each other, up here the mountain duskies look a bit like two-lined salamanders (Eurycea bislineata).




Plenty of rain had fallen during the weekend, indeed I drove through some rain on the way up and found the ground wet and the clouds just parting as I set off down the narrow dirt road. This is good turtle weather, and if I'd been in the Pine Barrens I would have fully expected to find a box turtle (Terrepane carolina) luxuriating in a warm puddle or snapping up a slug. Up in the Northern Tier, however, I was looking for wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta - my apologies to Scott, who has yet to accept the genus change from 'Clemmys').

...and Bingo! I found old red legs himself just at the edge of the road.



 

I need to take a moment to appreciate the apt species name, with 'insculpta' perfectly describing the top part of the shell (carapace).

As an aside, I should mention all the pretty butterflies. Mentioning all the pretty butterflies is the kind of thing that can lose a herper his herping cred, but I was pleased to be able to photograph the skittish little bugs as they dined on fresh manure, deposited by a couple horses I had passed a few minutes before.


I hoofed it back to the car in time to pick up my staff member, who quickly learned that riding across the state with me includes abrupt U-turns to inspect road jerky and the occasional turtle-like rock.

I like them black and velvety. Timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus) all start off beige with dark bands and end up in two basic patterns: either yellow with dark bands or almost all black, with light edging marking off where the bands used to be. Scott tends to go for the blondes, I go for the black ones, particularly when they're clean and lustrous, soaking up the light like pools of shadow in the forest.

Here's one we found in our path on our way up a mountain on Saturday.






Here's another nearby. The fat back end indicates that this is one of the gravid (pregnant) females that hang out at this spot until they give birth.


Here's another, looking like a normal basking rattler...


...until we zoom in on its nose.





We live in an age of extinctions. It's certainly true for our amphibians - take the recent wave of frog species falling to Bd infections. Some think this could apply to the timber rattlesnakes too. For a couple years I've noticed that some of the rattlers I've seen have ugly lesions on their faces. Other herpers I've been out with commented on it too, and they noted that the lesions are concerning some professionals as well, the fear being that a something similar to the Bd could be coming for our rattlers.

Will Magnolia see these timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus) when she's all grown up? Timbers can live for decades, so in theory it's possible, but that's not what I'm getting at. I mean will these rattlers or their descendents still be on that mountainside when she's old enough to hike out on her own and look for them?

This is a kind of fear that drives a lot of my herping, that the species I'm seeing might not be there (maybe not extinct, but perhaps locally much harder to find) later on, and that I don't want to look back in another twenty years and wish I'd seen more box turtles (Terrapene carolina), or wood turtles (Glyptemys insculpta) before they were all gone... or timber rattlers.

One article on local rattler extinctions in New Hampshire noted a mysterious fungal infection playing a role. A herper on Field Herp Forum noted seeing some of her favorite rattlers waste away with similar lesions to the ones I've seen. It's enough to scare me.

Now, skin infections are pretty common in snakes, particularly in the spring. I frequently see snakes in the spring with ugly blisters all over them. These are commonly assumed to result from damp hibernacula, and they usually clear up. Researchers I have corresponded with commented that they've been seeing PA rattlers with this sort of lesion for decades, and that they're more or less the same kind of temporary infections. I do hope so. 


Now, on a much lighter note, the berry report:

Blueberries were abundant, though a little watery tasting.

The blackberries were better, though not quite as abundant. I had trouble taking a photo of them, not because they wouldn't sit still, but because I kept eating them and thinking 'crap, I meant to take a photo of those berries I just ate.'

I wish I had something more exciting to report. Partly this is from blogging pride, but mostly it's from the basic craving that all herpers have to get out in any good weather and find something slimy or scaly.

In the middle of the summer I look forward to either being in the water or being in the mountains. I can do the former if I don't have to tend the baby (she's sitting up and crawling, but I don't think she's ready to fight the current in the Delaware quite yet), and I can do the latter with the baby but only if I have the car. Lately on the weekends I've been taking care of the baby but without the car.

On Sunday, though, I worked it out with Jen, who had to work the morning, that I would drop her off at work and take the baby out flipping AC.

Non herpers might need some translation there: 'flipping' refers to the activity of looking underneath the objects being 'flipped' to see if any herps are hiding underneath. Though the term 'flipping' might imply a reckless process, in practice we carefully lift each object and then carefully replace it just like we found it. Sloppy flipping is enough to get you black listed in herping circles. 'AC' stands for 'artificial cover,' in other words trash.

Thus, I put the baby in a stroller and we walked in an area of Philadelphia where milksnakes (Lampropeltis triangulum) are known to occur and where dumped trash is abundant. Obviously I didn't find any, otherwise I'd have led off this post with an actual something exciting to report.

A little later on I decided that I needed to see some kind of reptile or amphibian, even if it was easy, distant, and reliable. So, Magnolia and cruised the towpath canal along the Schuylkill and looked at basking red bellied turtles (Pseudemys rubriventris). It ain't much, but it ain't nothing. They really are impressive turtles. I like how they often bask without dragging themselves completely out of the water. I respect a turtle that can flout social conventions like this.

It was like a reunion with the water. Since last October I'd been gazing at rivers from above the surface, longing to dive in, but the water was too cold (for me; the turtles can function quite well in spring weather - chilly water and warm sun). That's a long time for it to be too cold. And then up until the middle of June the water was warm enough but too high and muddy.

Finally, though, the weather dried and warmed up. The Delaware dropped and cleared, and I found a good Sunday for jumping in.

To be clear, 'jumping' isn't quite how I do it. The place I've found to access the river is off a sandbank (or island, depending on the water level), and I have to wade my way out to the rocks. I find it difficult to walk (waddle) in flippers, so my MO is to wade out in water shoes to a nice boulder at about thigh depth, drop my backpack, change footwear, and then begin.

It really is like entering another world. I have heard this from salt-water reef snorkelers and divers, and in my experience the same holds for fresh water. What impresses me is the sensual totality of the experience. At first, it almost always feels cold. Even if the water is in the mild 70s, the air is usually warmer so the contrast makes me shiver a bit as the water rises up my legs and, ultimately and conclusively, over my face. I love the pressure of the water as an enveloping embrace, the heavy tension as it cuts off the world above. The light turns pale green as my mask goes under, and my hearing fades to liquid murmurs. 

I could just drift at first and let the current pick me up to its speed, but I like to give a little kick with the flippers to feel that acceleration boosted by the river.

Here's one view of the target:





Each boulder sported at least a couple map turtles (Graptemys geographica) soaking up the sun. In the past I would have held no hope of grabbing a turtle from its rock. Most aquatic turtles are exceptionally wary, and map turtles are relatively wary aquatic turtles. They drop in if they see you looking at them funny from a hundred yards away. Thus my strategy had previously been to let them dive and then search for them hiding on the bottom.

Then, last year, I figured out an underwater ambush approach. The key is the flippers. Turtles don't seem to spook much at the sight of the top of a snorkel and mask drifting towards them, so I can very gently propel myself along with the flippers (keeping them under water) to twenty or so yards away, then submerge, cover the rest of the distance holding my breath, and then pop up right next to them on the boulder. Grabbing them is a bit of a challenge even at that point, but I have discovered that an average-sized adult man with flippers can swim faster than a map turtle, so it's easy to run (swim?) them down even if they jump in.

Here are some of the results:

 




















These are females. Usually I think of the males as easier to catch, but for some reason (or random luck) I was unable to catch any males on this trip.

The females are much, much larger than their mates and live somewhat separate lives. They like deeper water, they tend to like basking spots further off shore, and they eat harder-shelled foods (think clams and mussels rather than bugs) with those beefy heads.

I did find one big girl sitting on the bottom. This is always a thrill, when the river bottom I'm used to  (rock, rock, rock, bigger rock, rock, log, rock, rock, rock... to the point of hypnosis) is broken by the tapered, leaf-like outline of a map turtle.

Sometimes I do think they look better underwater.

Hasta luego!

Turtles aren't the only neat critters in the river. I saw an impressive channel catfish in the crease under one boulder before I could get my camera out, but this yellow lamp mussel held still for me.

A couple times I pulled myself out of the water to rest on my boulder. It was so warm and cozy; I hadn't realized the water was chilling me a little until I felt the sun again. It occurred to me that I was becoming more like a turtle the more time I spent in the river.

 

I accessed the river via a path along a canal. On the way back I saw plenty of turtles in that water as well (I had seen some stink pots - Sternotherus oderatus - on the way in too), including this map turtle...
















And the more impressive redbellies (Pseudemys subrubrum), who tend to like slower, murkier water than the maps.

A few turtles had lost their nests to predators, as evidenced by these shriveled shells next to a dug-up hole.



I'll close with a bone to toss to the people who like the warm-blooded, furry-type wildlife. I know deer on either side of the river above Trenton are about as remarkable as squirrels, but the doe and fawn looked cute together.

This week I got an envelope of shed snake skins in the mail. An Urban Sustainability Forum (a program of the Academy of Natural Sciences Center for Environmental Policy) contact had been telling me about the snakes that live in her garden in Northwest Philly, and she sent me some of the shed skins to identify.

These are from brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) - the usual suspects throughout most of the City - but I liked how they arrived folded in wax paper. I'm half tempted to add some colorful dried maple leaves and iron the whole thing, which gets me thinking about why snake skins aren't used more often for arts and crafts projects.

This Sunday, as I walked from a turtling spot to my car, my six-year-old nephew Ezra got on the phone and told me about a snake he had seen on a nature walk in Connecticut. With deliberate precision he recounted that it had a dark stripe on each side, and a tan stripe down the back. It's tongue was bright red. It didn't even hiss; it just raised its head, looked at him, and slithered away. Then he explained that he was Harry Potter, at which point his three-year-old brother Simon hopped on the phone and explained that he was Ron and that my sister was Hermione, and soon the brothers were engaged in a fierce wizard duel while I tried to talk to my sister.

I told her it was a garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis), much like one I had found the previous weekend.



I found this snake in the Yeadon side of Mount Moriah Cemetery, a place that, if I go more than a month without visiting, the vegetation grows with such vigor that I don't recognize the place anymore, and I find myself a little intimidated by the vehemence with which nature reclaims a space once we turn our backs on it.

One of the disconcerting aspects of the overgrowth is that the various sections of the cemetery can be overtaken by distinct types of vegetation, as if the plants have staked out exclusive territories bounded by the paths, themselves claimed alternately by grass, red clover, and vetch. Some sections hide beneath a carpet of day lillies. Some are buried under a ten-foot mass of Japanese knotweed, and this one is getting overtaken by a thicket of sassafras.







This is our future, folks. Someday, maybe hundreds or thousands of years in the future when we're either extinct or all living in giant plexiglass bubbles beneath the surface of the ocean, Philadelphia will look like the Mount Moriah Cemetery.

 
I found a ratsnake, so everything is going to be okay. That's a basic truth of my life, by the way. It's impossible for me to find a black ratsnake (Pantherophis obsoleta) and then believe that everything isn't going to be okay. I might not believe in God, but I believe in black ratsnakes. Indeed in my more mystical moments I could be convinced that black ratsnakes are linked together into a super consciousness that, when I find one, taps me into something sublime and much deeper than a snake. I can't look one in it's big, bugged out eyes as it calmly inspects my face and think nothing is going on in there. Since individual snakes are unarguably stupid, I'm left with the ratsnake-as-more-than-snake hypothesis. Right? Douglas Adams had his lab mice; I've got my black ratsnakes. (so now you know how I chose my avatar)

Thus I was thrilled to introduce my six-month-old daughter to her first black ratsnake, or rather to present her to my ratsnake deity.

The ratsnake couldn't take me seriously enough to go into a proper defensive posture

I like to think I have a way with ratsnakes (even in a very mundane sense), and though this one nipped me when I gently pulled it out of the bushes by the side of the path, it quickly reverted to the calm 'explore-the-human' mode that so charms me.



 
 
Thus I would have been surprised if it had bitten her, but the thought of how Magnolia's mother would react if I brought her home with a couple lines of ratsnake-tooth pinpricks (ultimately less damage than she does to herself when we forget to clip her fingernails, but still...) kept me from letting the ratsnake get within touching range. Still he got a good look at her and she got a good look at him, so I feel confident that the proper forces of the cosmos are aware of Magnolia. Then she got annoyed that the daddy-ride through the woods had stopped moving, and she promised to escalate the complaint if I didn't start walking again.

American toad (Bufo americanus) that we couldn't stop to catch

This, it turns out, is one of the two major challenges of mountain herping with a six-month-old (the other being the basic rock-hopping balance complications): that she has no patience for still, quiet contemplation. I might have my reasons for spending time in the woods, but hers are the rhythmic lurching of the daddy-ride and the rich scenery moving past her perch on my chest. When the daddy-ride finds a really neat basking copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix) and wants to stare in admiration at its autumnally beautiful hourglass pattern, the passenger starts squirming and shouting loud enough to wake the copperhead, however deaf it might supposedly be to airborne sound.

Thar be copperheads!

See it?

The other (three major challenges! I feel like Cardinal Ximenez) is simply getting out of the house on time, so that you don't show up late on an inconveniently sunny day and find all the basking spots devoid of timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus).

But we found a black ratsnake, so everything is going to be okay.