“There ain’t much between the Pole and South Dakota, and barb wire won’t stop the wind…” So goes a pretty good song by James McMurtry, but I beg to differ with him – there’s a whole bunch of North Dakota in the way, to say nothing of Manitoba. I was up that way earlier this year with friends Don and Chris, and despite the long drive over roads as straight as a frozen rope, it’s a beautiful part of the country, with some interesting herps and other fauna. If you keep driving west across the state, eventually you’ll run into the badlands country, and the Roosevelt National Grasslands. We visited both the northern and southern units of the grasslands, one…
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The new herping season unfolds and whatever may happen, I know that at some point I will be standing in chilly water, listening to the peeps, whistles, trills, clicks, clacks, bleats and moans of calling frogs and toads. Few things give me greater pleasure and I would not miss this ritual for all the world. Operation Snoring Thunder is an early spring ritual, and the timing depends on temperatures, when the rains come, and when we participants can get away and drive to the southern third of Illinois. This year it fell on a Friday night, and as Justin drove down from Peoria, I left Champaign with Tristan and Yatin, and we all met up with Jeremy at the Walmart…
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“When you go, check out the city parks – those are the best places to see water monitors.” I’ve heard this advice from several sources, and since we had a number of days scheduled in Bangkok, it seemed like a no-brainer. One of the reasons I picked a hotel out in the suburbs north of the airport was the large park it bordered, and that turned out to be a good decision. Our first morning there, eating breakfast on the verandah overlooking the park, Jeff said “there’s one!” and we watched a medium-sized Varanus salvator swimming across the lake. There was no mistaking that large lizard head in profile. Breakfast On The Verandah Life Lister Number One. Still a bit…
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My buddy Justin posted a link to a paper on Facebook yesterday: “The desert tortoise trichotomy: Mexico hosts a third, new sister-species of tortoise in the Gopherus morafkai – G. agassizii group”. I’ve been waiting for this; it’s been known for some time that Gopherus populations in southern Sonora and northern Sinaloa are genetically distinct. The tortoises that roam the thornscrub and tropical deciduous forest have finally been described as Gopherus evgoodei, and reading the paper brought back memories of my own encounters with this new species, on my first trip to Mexico with some friends back in 2011. We spent a number of days herping in southern Sonora, and on one of them we visited a bio-preserve in the…
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Andrew Durso’s Life Is Short, But Snakes Are Long is one of my favorite herp blogs. In his latest installment, Andrew talks about books, bushmasters, and Ditmars – a few of my favorite things, all wrapped up neatly together in one post.
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I ask that question from time to time. “Uh, because it’s Regina?” I never liked that answer. If ‘Queen Snake’ springs from Regina, the name of its genus, then where does Regina come from? If it’s the other way ’round, then who is responsible? Sorting this out has been less than satisfying, very confusing, and frustrating to some degree. It looks as if the Queen Snake first enters the taxonomy without her fancy name. Thomas Say described Coluber septemvittatus in 1825, describing it as “brownish, with three blackish lines; beneath yellow, with four blackish lines…” Say provides no common names, but handles mentioned in other writings include ‘seven-lined snake’, ‘leather snake’, ‘willow snake’, and ‘moon snake’ (that last one is pretty cool). From…
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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…
