I retired from the University of Illinois on May 1st. On the 23rd I boarded a flight to Kuala Lumpur, kicking off a 31 day excursion to 5 countries in southeast Asia. Malaysia was my first stop, and I met up with friends Dan, Kevin, Adam, and Kurt. During our stay, we herped upland and lowland forests. On our first night in KL we herped a nearby forest with great success. Our first herp was a Peter’s bow-fingered gecko, Cyrtodactylus consobrinus. Kurt spotted a snake in a small tree – a blue bronzeback, Dendrelaphis cyanochloris. This species inflates its body to show a brilliant blue on the tips of the scales, but it was tough to get the snake to…
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I’ve threatened for a while to kick off a Big Year in search of amphibians and reptiles, much like some birders do. 2019 wasn’t a Big Year on purpose, but when the smoke cleared, it was certainly a ‘big-ish’ year; a thousand-plus herps observed (and vouchered in HerpMapper), spread across 380 species, and 194 lifers. Here are many of the highlights from this awesome year, so big-ish I had to split it up among a half-dozen posts. ‘Hot Stove Herping’ is a phrase I coined years ago, for use in end-of-year posts on the old Field Herp Forum. I stole it from baseball; members of the ‘hot stove league’ huddle together during the cold winter months and talk baseball until…
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Taiwan is simply an awesome field herping destination. Despite having only four active days in Taiwan, the time I spent there was my favorite part of a 31 day herping odyssey across five countries in southeast Asia. When I landed in Taipei I was raring to go – I was finally recovering from a terrible chest cold acquired on my outbound flight to Kuala Lumpur three weeks earlier. I felt pretty good for a change, and was looking forward to finally herping this island, sitting on top of my must-see list for a long time. The plan was to herp up in the interior mountains, but before heading up there, I spent the first night herping a hillside forest near…
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Iquitos, a Peruvian river city accessible to the outside world only by water or air, has just one road leading out of town, a two-lane blacktop that runs for 60 km to the port of Nauta. The night before our tour group heads down the Amazon, we engage a van and driver and cruise the Nauta road (see my post ‘Road-Cruising in Amazonia‘ for more details). The experience gives our clients a taste of what’s to come, and a chance to get to know each other before the trip really kicks off. This year our night of cruising proved to be a rainy one, not so good for finding snakes, but most excellent conditions for frogs. We stopped at multiple…
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Occasionally I’m asked questions like “what is your favorite herp / herping place / herp adventure?”. Answers for the first two change constantly, but to date I have a pretty steady answer for the third one. I’m a card-carrying thamnophile. My love affair with the genus Thamnophis carries across four decades now, and shows no sign of stopping. After a trip to Oregon in 2007, where I had a great day in the field with handfuls of Oregon Red-spotted Garter Snakes, I wanted to return to the west coast and see every species of Thamnophis out that way. I expressed my desire to anyone who would listen – “hey, we could start south, maybe San Diego, and work our way…
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When October wanes and November approaches, I start to wonder about when my herping season will end. What will be the last herp of the year? Can I see one more new thing, or have I already added the last new species? And most importantly, how can I prolong my herping season? I’ve been working for most of this year on a book project (one of the reasons blog posts here have been scarce) and needed to meet with my co-author, Josh Holbrook. The last week of October I made the nine-hour drive to Josh’s home in western North Carolina. Josh teaches biology at Montreat College, nestled in a picturesque valley along the edge of the Pisgah National Forest, and…
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The neonate tzabcan had crawled out of a cornfield, and was making its way to dense forest on the other side of the road when it was smashed flat against the pavement by a passing vehicle. We stopped to take a look at the unfortunate little rattlesnake; I took a photo voucher and a data point, and we went back to road-cruising. After passing that spot several times, Matt and Tim wanted out of the car, figuring that Mama Tzabcan, or siblings of the squashed snake, might still be over in that field. Their flashlights and headlamps disappeared from view as I whipped a u-turn and road-cruised solo for a while, maximizing our efforts. Five miles down the road I…
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One of the hallmark activities of field herping, driving on (preferably) lonely roads at night can be incredibly productive at times. In the United States there are some famous and infamous roads for road cruising; Mexico is chock full of them, and other countries have their share. I’m here to tell you about an unusual one, a singular road in a place more suitable for dugout canoes than tires on asphalt. Iquitos, former headquarters of Peru’s long-defunct rubber boom and home to nearly a half million humans, is a land-locked island on the Amazon River. There are no roads to Iquitos – one arrives there by boat, or by air. All things necessary for life in Iquitos arrive in the…
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The hard drive on my laptop bricked recently, and while going through the laborious process of restoring files from backup, I came across a folder labeled ‘10292006’ in my image archive. Opening the folder and looking at the images within, I remembered that October 29th, 2006 had been a good day, no, a great day in the field, a pit viper extravaganza at the very end of the field herping season in southern Illinois with my buddy Steve. These were the unedited, original archived images – my method is to save them off after tossing out the bad and the blurry, and to process copies via Photoshop. The file sizes from back then were little more than half a meg…
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There’s not much trouble with this herping life, except for the Too-Many-Too-Much problem: too many places to visit, too much to see, and too much to cram into a relatively short lifespan. It always boils down to money and time; choices have to be made, and there are too many bright and shiny objects to choose from in the herping world. I may regret not visiting the Everglades earlier, but what other experience would I have willingly missed to make room? You can probably guess the answer, but nevertheless I felt a bit irritated at taking so long to get there. I’ve been to Florida a number of times, but never any further south than Orlando. A July work conference…
