Note: ‘Hot Stove Herping’ is a phrase I coined years ago, for use in end-of-year posts on the old Field Herp Forum. I stole it from baseball; members of the ‘hot stove league’ huddle together during the cold winter months and talk baseball until spring and the game comes back. In a similar fashion, field herpers living in moderate climates hunker down amid the cold and snow and think of the year that passed, and dream of the coming spring. For the first time in ten years, I did not start off the herping season in January with a trip to Peru. Due to Covid, we canceled our expeditions for the year and planned on regrouping in 2022. As it…
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Spring, summer or fall, it doesn’t matter – when the sun sets on the far side of the Mississippi, amphibians and reptiles are out and about in the La Rue-Pine Hills Research Natural Area. Walking along Snake Road after dark can be interesting and can produce a few surprises. Treefrogs tend to start coming out after sunset, and it doesn’t have to be completely dark out – mostly dark seems to be enough to trigger activity. Perhaps the most common (and most iconic) is the Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea). Green treefrogs are easier to spot at night. They tend to move out from their hiding places in the vegetation, and they stand out very well in the beam of a…
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There are many ways to discover amphibians and reptiles – you can road-cruise for them, flip rocks and logs and trash, or even just walk them up. But if you haven’t made use of boardwalks, you’re missing out. There are a lot of boardwalks out there in parks, preserves, and natural areas, and birders make good use of them. As it happens I’ve spotted a number of interesting herps from boardwalks crowded with birders, all of them looking up or out while my focus is considerably closer to the ground. Boardwalks typically allow access to wet areas like swamps or marshes, and this past April I spent some time at a swamp boardwalk in the Jean Lafitte National Historic Park…
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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 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…
