After our daytime photo session with the tree-loving Tropidolaemus, we spent the day making a long drive south to the Krabi area. As we got closer to the border with Malaysia, we began to see more Muslim influences among the people there, and in the food choices available to us. Travel means rolling with the changes and embracing new things, and for my part, banana roti for breakfast was easily embraceable. That night we engaged in some city herping, visiting an old temple that was once out in the countryside, but was now surrounded on all sides by a rapidly expanding urban area. We parked on a nearby street and immediately upon entering the property we encountered our first serpent,…
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After a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast, we were ready to get back at it. From here on out, our days had a repeatable pattern – drive a bit, herp in appropriate habitat, drive some more, and then herp again after dark. We would be up in the hills and down on the coast, bouncing back and forth as we made our way south. The food was good, the people were friendly, and the countryside had no end of things to look at as we went along. The karst limestone escarpments were spectacular, and I was looking forward to seeing more of them in the light of day. This morning we stopped at several temples up in the…
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While in Peru back in January of 2023, I was having a conversation with Pete Mooney about possible herp trip collaborations. Pete and I have herped together in a number of places, including Peru, and a delightful trip to Cuba a few years earlier. “I’m so jealous of your southern Thailand trip,” I said, speaking of an adventure Pete had the previous year. At the time I had been to Thailand twice, but had not visited the southern peninsula region. As it turned out, Pete was open for a second visit, and so we set the wheels in motion for a June expedition. As with previous visits, we made our arrangements through TonTan Travel. Our friends Tony and Tan specialize…
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Here’s another ‘pod blog’, providing supplemental material for Episode 124: Herp Science Sunday with Justin Lee. In this episode of HSS, Dr. Alex Krohn and I had a conversation with Justin Lee, currently working on his PhD at the University of Michigan. The bulk of our conversation centered around the genus Oligodon, of which Justin is a subject matter expert. Justin has authored and co-authored a number of papers on Kukri snakes, describing new species, and producing an updated phylogeny of Oligodon in 2024. The material I am presenting here, including some of my Oligodon photos, supports the podcast episode; if you haven’t listened yet, I think it’s an entertaining segment featuring a very cool snake genus, and an up-and-coming…
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Our expedition clients have spent the last three nights hiking the trails around the field station here in the Peruvian rainforest. Those nights have been very productive, in terms of herps and other critters seen and experienced. But long hikes in the heat and humidity take their toll, and afterwards, when folks close their eyes for sleep, the afterimages of waving flashlight beams play against the back of their eyelids. It’s time to change things up – time to take a night off, give tired eyes and legs a rest. Time for the Boa Boat. The sign-up sheet is over by the icebox, and we leave a half hour after dark. Wear long sleeves, bring your bug spray and rain…
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A new feature of this blogspace are ‘pod blogs’, which support and supplement some of the episodes of my herp podcast, and this is the first. In Episode 114: Always Get The Full Coverage, I and my panel of campfire cronies had an interesting discussion about mishaps and misadventures with automobiles in the field. This was such a rich vein for us to explore, and since I’ve collected a number of photos from various trips that document many mishaps, here’s a supplemental sample to go with the episode. All of this makes more sense if you’ve listened to the show first, but hey, you do you… I’m happy I took a photo of Arturo’s truck down in Coahuila, but I…
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…”dear friends, once more…” I haven’t posted here since the second week of January in 2022, which was also the week I received my first Covid vaccination. You would think that being retired and house-bound by a pandemic would afford ample opportunities to get some writing done, but hard times are not always the best crucible for creativity, despite what you hear. And I was pouring a lot of effort into my then-new podcast, which easily absorbed all of my free time and creative energy. No complaints about that, but I had little left in the tank for the written word, not even for the Hot Stove Herping posts, heavy with thrill and chill but light on research and thoughtful…
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It’s a bit of a drive but we made from the ocean to the desert in time to get in some road-cruising after dark. There’s one quiet road that I really like, and as a bonus our friend Dan drove in from L.A. to hang out for a couple days. It’s a great road for sidewinders (Crotalus cerastes) and they did not disappoint. In fact, the sidewinders were downright amazing. We came upon our second predation event of the trip, an adult sidewinder with a kangaroo rat, right in the road. We stayed at the scene to make sure no vehicles interrupted (or ran over) the snake as it swallowed its prey. No telling if it had envenomated the roo…
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It started in Las Vegas, as many stories do, and really, there were several significant loops made during this journey. I went through the PITA hoops to secure a rental car at the airport, and then picked up Tim and John at a casino and we left Vegas in our rear-view mirror, heading west into California. We crashed that night near Bakersfield, and the next morning, headed further west to the Carrizo Plain National Monument. We met up with a group doing research on Bluntnose Leopard Lizards (Gambelia sila), and I was thrilled that we got the opportunity to walk the research area and help search for these lizards (which blend in very well with their surroundings). I was even…
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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. Ah, Paraguay. Paraguay is a beautiful country but desperately needs to revamp their immigration bureaucracy – three members of our group were turned back at Customs for ‘suspected forgery of Covid documents’ (they weren’t). Needless to say, this was a…
