“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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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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…was a frog. Or rather, a dozen frogs. Recently, Tracey Mitchell and I made one last trip to the southern portion of Illinois, in hopes of finding a few more serpents before the door slammed for good on the season. Temperatures the previous night had dropped into the lower thirties, but with a forecast of sun and sixty, we thought our chances were pretty good of seeing a few cool species close to their hibernacula. The destination for our one-day rocket run south was a set of limestone bluffs, remote and seldom visited by other herpers, mostly because there is no easy way to reach them. There are no trails, and one has to force a path through blackberry bush…
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I started field herping in the early 1970s. I’ve been blogging about herps since 1996. Of course, blogging hadn’t been invented yet, but nobody told us, the handful of proto-bloggers who felt the compulsion to write about our adventures with amphibians and reptiles. I used to write lengthy missives about some of the trips I made, but it was very time consuming, and these days I don’t have the time for that. It also led to a lot of sloppy writing without much thought behind it. Very embarrassing. My goal with this blog is keep the focus on a single theme – a specific herp, a singular moment, a topic I want to explore. Everything bouncing around in my brain…
