Got Buttermilk?

For Christmas 1973 I received a copy of Roger Conant’s “Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians”, and thus discovered the Buttermilk Racer. The eighth printing of the original edition, first printed in my birth year of 1958. The illustrations were amazing, using photographs as a base and then lovingly rendered by Isabelle Hunt Conant to make them stand out and represent each species. I had my favorites, including the entire rat snake plate, and the so-called Buttermilk Snake (Coluber constrictor anthicus), tucked in with the other racers and coachwhips on Plate 23. I looked at the Buttermilk Snake many times, and I remember thinking I needed to find a way to see one. Birders talk about ‘spark birds’, and anthicus was a ‘spark herp’ of sorts for me, awakening an interest in me to ‘go see’ – to find herps beyond my local area. This expansive idea would have to wait for its time – I wasn’t old enough to drive back then, and my field herping excursions were limited by the range of my bicycle. It would take me a while to give the Buttermilk Racer a shot, as it turned out.

NOTE: I originally wrote this account back in 2010, and in this updated version, I’ve kept most of the original text, while editing for clarity and adding some omitted details. Additions include a few trains of thought I’ve considered in the sixteen years since I first published this journal entry. The scientific names are unchanged, with one or two exceptions. The text-photo format is different under WordPress, so some images have been moved to a slide gallery at the end. I also reprocessed the images using the original archived files, gaining a little clarity and quality thanks to the newest version of Photoshop, but there’s only so much you can do with sixteen year old images, even those from a then top of the line point-and-shoot camera. So it goes.

In 2010 I joined some friends in a quest for the Buttermilk Racer over the Memorial Day weekend. Matt and Jim (the Herp Journal guys) live in Iowa, and Jeff lives in Minnesota, so it would be a long drive to east Texas for all of us. Late May was not ideal for this expedition, as Texas was scorching hot by then, but it was the only time the four of us could make our schedules work. Racers were still likely to be active, we reasoned, so it wasn’t quite a fool’s errand, and we had some other likely targets to search for. We would go see.

We decided to meet in Kansas City, leaving my car at Jim’s sister’s house, and then heading south together from there in Jim’s big blue truck. Most of my journey to KC involved driving due west, and since I had gotten an early start, I stopped to do some herping in northern Missouri along the way. It had rained the night before, and I moved a number of box turtles off the two-lane highway. I also encountered several Plains Garter Snakes (Thamnophis radix) out on the roads, and took photos before scooting them out of harm’s way. There’s nothing like a little rain to bring out the reptiles.

I stopped off at a small conservation area, and ran into big trouble while trying to turn over a overly large, extra-heavy railroad tie that was stuck in some mud. It was too much for me, and I tore my left biceps muscle loose. It made an awful noise, like tearing a rag in two, and everything faded to black for a moment. Then the light came back, and I threw up my breakfast. I sat down on the unturned railroad tie and tried to get a handle on things. The pain faded a bit after a while, and I considered my options. I figured surgery was in my near future, but I didn’t want to back out of the trip – nothing was going to happen until after Memorial Day anyway, and I was only about 90 minutes from our rendezvous point. I stopped at a gas station for some ice packs and continued on to Kansas City and our rendezvous. I think the other guys thought I was a little nuts in wanting to continue, but it was better than slinking home with nothing to show for my trouble. I claimed shotgun in the truck, and rested my bum arm on the center console for the rest of the trip, and let everyone else do most of the log rolling and tin flipping.

Heading south from KC, we stopped for the night in Oklahoma City, and after getting a hotel room we crossed to the other side of the highway and poked around an old vacant lot, flipping junk and finding several Brown Snakes (Storeria dekayi) and a small Common Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis).

After sunset, we did some road-cruising on two-lane roads around the outskirts of OKC. Our first herp on the road was a real winner – a Western Pigmy Rattlesnake (Sistrurus miliarius streckeri), just under a foot in length. We were hoping to find this species on our way south, as a side quest. The little rattler was a life-list addition for all of us, and a very pretty specimen, gray with just a touch of light blue tint.

Next up on the road was a Copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix). We were close to an intergrade zone between the Osage and the Broad-Banded Copperhead, and this snake showed some pattern characteristics of both subspecies. The only other herp of the night was a pretty Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor / Hyla chrysocelis).

Early the next morning we took photos of the copperhead and the pigmy rattler, and released them at their capture points before starting the next leg of our long drive south to east Texas. We stopped several times that morning to move sliders and box turtles from the roadway. As per usual, we saw far more flattened turtles than live ones, so it felt good each time we got one to safety. Too many drivers either don’t pay attention, and a few twisted individuals deliberately run over turtles and other animals, an act which is simply abominable.

Did I mention it was a long, hot drive to Texas? There was plenty to for us to talk about on the way, but when the conversation lagged, Jim broke out some Riders in The Sky. You can’t go wrong with a little cowboy music, especially the yodeling parts. Dick Bartlett would approve.

We made it down to Houston County by evening, and did some road cruising in the state forest. We found a sad DOR – an adult female Eastern Hognose (Heterodon platirhinos) on one of the forest roads. On the bright side, also we found a live Texas Rat Snake (Pantherophis obsoletus lindheimeri) crossing the road after sunset.

We heard frogs calling and toads trilling at a low spot along the road, and stopped to have a look. Green Treefrogs (Hyla cinerea) were making a racket with their queenk-queenk-queenk call, and I saw several pairs in amplexus.

Woodhouse Toads (Bufo woodhousii) were also present, although they didn’t really look like the woodhousii I’d seen elsewhere – these were smaller, and very plain, and very brown.

The calling toads were a small number of Gulf Coast Toads (Incilius valliceps), calling from the edges of puddles. One of my favorite field herping activities is photographing calling anurans, and I was happy to add valliceps and their gorgeous throat sacs to my list.

The next day we met up with Scott Wahlberg, who would spend the next couple of days herping with us. Scott is one of the nicest herpers you’ll meet, and I’m sure he thought we were a little nuts coming to Texas at the end of May, when daytime temperatures were getting into the mid-90s. Nevertheless, he got out in the field with us and I enjoyed getting to know him better. I would describe Scott as an all-around naturalist, as he is deeply interested in all the flora and fauna of east Texas.

We spent a very long, very hot day driving from tin sites to junk piles in search of the elusive Buttermilk Racer. No big snakes were out, but we found a few Rough Earth Snakes (Virginia striatula) and an Incilius valliceps or two. East Texas has a considerable amount of abandoned houses, trash dumps and junk piles tucked away, and we flipped tin and boards until our flippers were sore. I did the best I could with one arm, and left the heavy stuff to the other guys.

At one point we stopped at an old sawmill, and while the herps were thin on the ground, we did see a small colony of Rafinesque’s Big-eared Bats (Corynorhinus rafinesquii) clustered on a ceiling in one of the old buildings there. Those big ears certainly made the bats appear much larger than they were. Even when the herps aren’t biting, there’s usually some other interesting critter to enjoy.

It was hot, sweaty work on a hot, sweaty day, and while we were disappointed at our results thus far, we weren’t ready to throw in the towel. Prior experience had taught us that sometimes you just have to grind it out to get results. We kept on going, herping trash piles and abandoned buildings into the evening hours.

We road-cruised that night, but could only turn up a few DOR Texas Rats. The next morning, we got up early and drove south to work around the Houston area. We stopped along the way at a junk spot near the Trinity River, and had some success. We flipped a sub-adult Eastern Coachwhip (Masticophis flagellum flagellum) and a juvenile Cottonmouth (Agkistrodon piscivorus).

Another cool find was a Rio Grande Chirping Frog (Eleutherodactylus cystignathoides campi). This little frog is spreading north along the Texas coast, probably hitchhiking in landscaping plants, and was a lifer for me.

The day was just starting to get some heat to it when we stopped to work a string of junk piles along a back road. Within a few short minutes, Jim lifted up a small board and found the object of our quest, a Buttermilk Racer! It was a gorgeous one too. looking much like the one in Conant’s field guide that I had been staring at since I was in middle school.

We found a shady place to take a few pictures and to examine the serpent in detail. About 30 inches in length, the snake looked like a paint-by-number project in the hands of a madman, and most scales consisted of a single color, so that the scales defined the overall pattern. The random juxtaposition of white scales and light bluish-gray scales and darker blue scales is completely different from any other snake in North America. The venter was a pale gray, save for some splashes of yellow here and there, and the chin was a creamy white. This snake was beautiful and strange-looking at the same time, and I just wanted to keep looking at it.

The Reptile Database reports that “…anthicus is from the Greek verb anthidza meaning “to be strewn with flowers, dyed, or metaphorically, sprinkled with white” in reference to the speckled color pattern of adults.” As always, I’m interested in the origin of the common name – who hung “Buttermilk Snake” on this creature? Its first appearance in the literature was in 1953, in A Check List of North American Amphibians and Reptiles, 6th Edition, edited by Karl P. Schmidt. Where did Schmidt pick up this name? Prior to this, the snake had other names in reference materials, including “Ash Snake”, “Variegated Racer”, and “Louisiana Black Snake”.

And setting common names aside, what is the reason for the bizarre appearance of Coluber constrictor anthicus? This color pattern has a small distribution in eastern Texas and western Louisiana, and the snake prefers open forest-edge habitats with brushy cover, adjacent to longleaf pine and mixed pine-hardwood habitats. Presumably anthicus has more habitat these days given the impact of humans on forests and the expansion of forest edges, but what is it about this area that makes a white-spotted racer successful? Other racers exploit similar habitat across the continent, but white scales only appear in this region. It is a mystery to me.

After releasing the object of our quest at its point of capture, we continued our trash pile herping, and turned up a subadult Buttermilk! This snake only had a small amount of white scales, and if you disregarded those, it looked pretty much like a generic racer. I named it the Two Per Cent Buttermilk Racer.

We had found our target species on our last full day in Texas, and kept on herping into the evening. A pile of carpet yielded a nice Gulf Coast Ribbon Snake (Thamnophis proximus orarius), and the evening’s road cruising turned up a few nice Southern Copperheads.

The next day was our getaway day, and we spent the morning getting in a little more herping with Scott, and checking out an impressive 28-inch county record Scarlet Snake (Cemophora coccinea) that he had found earlier. The five of us had a nice meal at a local barbecue place (no better way to quit the Lone Star State) before bidding Scott adieu, and turning the big blue truck north.

It was time to start making the long drive back to Kansas City and from there, home. We stopped in Oklahoma again, and did some road cruising that evening around Tulsa. Snakes were out and moving that night, but unfortunately there was a lot of traffic on the roads, on the tail-end of the Memorial Day weekend.

There were so many DORs, including a handful of pigmy rattlers, and it was such a depressing experience. We saw one vehicle swerve into the other lane to deliberately pick off one of the pigs, which made our blood boil. Jeff and I collected a couple of the more intact dead streckeri for museum voucher specimens – at least some good would come out of their demise.

We drove a few farm roads in the morning, saving more box turtles in the process, and then hit the main highway north. In Kansas we stopped and flipped some rocks, in order to not have the last snake of the trip be a dead one. This was Jim’s idea and it was a good one, as a little Prairie Ringneck (Diadophis punctatus) put a positive spin on the end of a very long trip. We had put in a lot of miles on this adventure, but we did find our target herp, and a few more new species. Two weeks later a surgeon reattached my bicep muscle with the aid of a few screws, and on cold rainy days I get a deep ache in my upper left arm that reminds me of railroad ties, east Texas, and Buttermilk Racers.

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