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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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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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…
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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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“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…
