The end of the year traditionally requires an accounting of said year – and a very good year it was! I added 41 notches to my life list, got out in the field with lots of old friends, and made some new ones along the way. Here are some highlight reels for your enjoyment. In January I went to Georgia with some friends on behalf of the HerpMapper project. HerpMapper was establishing a relationship with Project Orianne, and one of the side benefits of the trip was spending a day looking for Eastern Indigo Snakes with the Orianne survey crew. Success? You bet! Over thirty feet of Indigo – six specimens, the largest at just under seven feet. Frogs…
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Hit Me With Your Nature Stick is one of my favorite field herping blogs. Mike and Andrea Howlett chronicle their herping adventures with a passion and excitement that make me wish I was there, and their latest post is no exception. Do yourself a favor and check out their account of rescuing sea turtles along Cape Cod in “Back to the Beach….” Well done, you two!
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“It’s the stuff dreams are made of” -Sam Spade My first awareness of the San Francisco Garter Snake came in the early seventies, when I came across a first edition of Stebbins’ western field guide. Like many herpers, I’ve been thinking about that snake ever since my first glimpse. To my midwestern teenage self, San Francisco was as far away as the moon, and who names a snake after a city, anyway? The Maltese Falcon was set in Frisco, and I’ve always loved the ‘stuff’ quote uttered by Spade at the film’s conclusion. The gaudy garter from the same burg was my dream, and many times I wondered if I would ever get to see one. In the mid-1990s I…
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KHS 42nd Annual Meeting
It’s a long way from my house to Hays, Kansas. Eleven hours behind the wheel is enough to make one wobbly, wild-eyed and weary, but the annual meeting of the Kansas Herpetological Society was worth it. A big part of the KHS meeting are the presentations that occupy the daytime hours. Listening to herpetologists speak on a variety of topics is an intellectually energizing experience, even when the details may be over my head. I don’t know much about P-values or Bayesian inferences, but I can ponder the big questions as well as anyone. Eli Greenbaum from the U of T – El Paso was the keynote speaker. His topic: “Mambas, Malaria, and Militias: 21st Century Herpetology in the Jungles…
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The rainy season paid no attention to the calendar and the downpours continued. The water was high at the Madre Selva field station, high enough to reach the steps of the kitchen tambo, and to leave the station’s generator on its own island. The boats were tied up close to the kitchen, and one night, Dan Wylie spotted something sculling along the bottom next to the skiff. “Pipa!” he shouted, but he could not get hands on it before it scooted away into deeper water. A few nights later, we were paddling down the Rio Orosa, coming back after a night of chasing black caiman back in the varzea, and I spotted my first Pipa pipa as it swam under…
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…was a frog. Or rather, a dozen frogs. Recently, Tracey Mitchell and I made one last trip to the southern portion of Illinois, in hopes of finding a few more serpents before the door slammed for good on the season. Temperatures the previous night had dropped into the lower thirties, but with a forecast of sun and sixty, we thought our chances were pretty good of seeing a few cool species close to their hibernacula. The destination for our one-day rocket run south was a set of limestone bluffs, remote and seldom visited by other herpers, mostly because there is no easy way to reach them. There are no trails, and one has to force a path through blackberry bush…
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I arrived a day later than the rest of the 2013 expedition to Baja Sur, in order to save myself $250 on the plane ticket. Consequently, I missed out on the first day’s catch, including a large calling congress of Spotted Toads (Bufo punctatus), and several Cape Aquatic Garter Snakes (Thamnophis valida celaeno), found along a rocky mountain stream that first day. I deeply regret the toads. Is a lifer garter snake worth $250? Probably, but that’s another blog post. Fortunately, mis amigos held back the snakes for a day and I was able to examine and photograph an adult and a juvenile. A nice consolation prize, but of course, I wanted to see one for myself. Who wouldn’t? Flash…
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I started field herping in the early 1970s. I’ve been blogging about herps since 1996. Of course, blogging hadn’t been invented yet, but nobody told us, the handful of proto-bloggers who felt the compulsion to write about our adventures with amphibians and reptiles. I used to write lengthy missives about some of the trips I made, but it was very time consuming, and these days I don’t have the time for that. It also led to a lot of sloppy writing without much thought behind it. Very embarrassing. My goal with this blog is keep the focus on a single theme – a specific herp, a singular moment, a topic I want to explore. Everything bouncing around in my brain…
