A few weeks after we moved into our home in June of 2000, there was a tremendous rainstorm that flooded the streets and left standing water everywhere. Walking out the side door afterwards, I came across a rain-soaked American Toad (Bufo americanus) crouching by the gate, and then nearly stepped on a Plains Garter Snake (Thamnophis radix). The snake zipped away, and I tucked the toad under a bush, out of harm’s way. In our twenty five years here, I’ve not seen another toad, but the yard garters have been constant companions during fair and foul weather, and a source of much enjoyment. As a field herper living in the middle of The Great Corn Desert that is central Illinois,…
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The word terrapin is rooted in the language of native peoples of North America. It is derived from torope, which comes from the southern Algonquin, and more specifically, from the long-extinct Powhatan tongue. It's no secret that words and phrases change over time, and when Europeans roll unfamiliar...
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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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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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The Madre Selva field station is on the banks of the Rio Orosa, and if you go out on that river at night, you can find Spectacled Caiman (Caiman crocodilus) in the quieter backwaters, their eyes glowing red when hit with a flashlight. Go up the shallow side creeks and tributaries and you have a shot at the smaller-sized Smooth-fronted Caiman (Paleosuchus trigonatus), lying under cut banks and in the deeper pools. But if you like your crocodilians enormous and elusive, you must push into the flooded varzea forest, away from the big rivers and the people who would hunt the Black Caiman. In 2011, the water was low enough that a group of us hazarded a slippery trail to…
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‘I am Nag,’ said the cobra; ‘look, and be afraid!’….But at the bottom of his cold heart, he was afraid. -Kipling It was our last full herping day in Thailand, and so far all of our venomous snakes had been pit vipers (Trimeresurus vogeli), at rest on tree branches over our heads. This last day we were at Kaeng Krachan National Park, a few hours southwest of Bangkok, and as it was hot and dry we were driving from water hole to water hole, looking for herps out to get a drink or a meal. The water holes, vaguely square or lozenge-shaped, were man-made, and dug for the park’s elephants and other charismatic wildlife. The abrupt edges of the water…
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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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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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“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…
