In addition to what we found in the field, there were also herps hanging around my mother’s house. Besides the innumerable Brown Anoles, Anolis sagrei, we also found Tree Frogs in the bushes and on the walls.
Cuban Tree Frog Osteopilus septentrionalis On occasion my
mother also finds Ringnecks by her front door, but our biggest surpise came
on a later trip (2006) when Ron’s son Ben made the completely unexpected discovery
of a Racer among the heliconias of the backyard.
Later in the week we made our annual
pilgrimage to the Anhinga Trail in
The real show-offs, however, were the birds who sat for their close-ups as if they were getting paid for their portraits. In a sense I suppose they’re staff as much as the rangers.
Finally, Ron and I took Ben out for a day of herping with the
big boys. Unfortunately it was still
sort of cool so we didn’t find much (unlike the Red-Shouldered Hawk who took off
not 25 feet from us with a Garter Snake in its talons!). Still, we did find a few things. The first was this Tropical House Gecko, a
recent colonist from Africa by way of
Cruised another area and found a pair of Ringneck Snakes under cover, but the best catches were crawling and hopping on the road at night. The first was an uncommon red-phase Green Water Snake, the first I’d ever seen. The last was simply a common Southern Leopard Frog, but the smile on Ben’s face after he caught it all by himself put this catch in a special category.
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