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 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…
