This was a great month for herping.
First, my brother Ron and I spent a week in the tropical rainforests
of Our first stop was to
release a beautiful Corn Snake our host had captured on an earlier
visit. Dan is a biology teacher and
had kept this snake to show his class, but it was now time to let it go, so
we returned to the same spot where it was originally found. As I watched it crawl away, Dan and his
friend were already turning sheets of tin, looking for the next one. They attacked a large pile nearby, flipping
one layer after another, when someone calls out, “Corn Snake!” and we see a
tail disappearing under the tin. They
finally get to the very bottom piece, flip it, and are rewarded with another
snake as beautiful as the one we returned.
But then someone says, “That’s not the one I saw”, and sure enough,
heading away from the pile is a second Corn Snake. For a moment I thought it was the snake we
had just released, but that one was continuing in the opposite
direction. So I guess the place was
literally crawling with Corn Snakes.
As the day grew hotter we decided to concentrate on wet places in the shade, namely, drainage ditches bordered by trees. Learned an interesting technique for shallow, weedy places. Stepping into the water, we dredged the edges with our wading boots, kicking soccer-style and launching wet debris up onto the sides of the ditch. We then waited to see if anything flopped about in all the muck and litter. Fish, frogs, crawfish, and other startled residents went flying up the bank and sliding back down again. Our real hope was for a siren, but instead we stirred up a pair of very pretty juvenile Carolina Cottonmouths.
Later on we tried the same technique
near a bridge where the water spread out among weeds by the side of a
highway. By this time my brother was
a pro (must have been his early interest in soccer), but when he succeeded in
splashing something out of the water that was slimy and slithering, I don’t
know who was more surprised, Ron or the siren that slipped through his
fingers! Gone for good I thought, but
Ron and Dan were persistent. Five
minutes of searching and sloshing and no sign, then suddenly a glimpse, a
grab, and a curse as it once again slid away.
This went on for about 20 minutes, but finally, it landed in the net
and stayed. First one we ever caught,
and we were right well pleased. A sad postscript. Ron brought the siren home, where it
thrived for six months before meeting an unlikely end. As he lamented in his e-mail: Bad news. We came back last week to find that the racoons had gotten
in to the house and massacred everything in that aquarium. The furry bastards didn't even eat the
siren, just bit it and left it for dead.
The mud minnows we had collected at Not the usual cause of death for captive herps. Another first for me was this
beautiful Mole Kingsnake that Dan grabbed going down a hole after he flipped
a board. Usually they’re more of a
brown coloration, but this was an example of the red-phase variety. Too bad the snake was opaque, getting ready
to shed, otherwise the color would have been even
richer and more glossy.
It was just before sunset so we
pulled away from the Mole King spot and began road cruising. We hadn’t gone but a couple hundred yards
when yet another Corn Snake crossed our path, this one the biggest and reddest
we had seen (altogether I think we counted eight that day, including DORs).
Later that evening we stopped to hike
back through some woods where there was a pond, in hopes of hearing Pine
Barrens Tree Frogs, but unfortunately they were not calling that night. We did find, however, a number of these
blunt-faced, cat-eyed, cartoonish-looking toads hopping about in the sandy
soil of the forest floor. Once again,
it was a first for me in the field.
There was one more “first in the
field” in store for me that night, in more ways than one. As we walked the sandy trail back through
the woods, I thought I heard a faint noise on the ground just to the right of
the path. It was very quiet, but it
had that sound of something moving, something sliding. I stopped, turned my flashlight, and discovered
to my delight that in the darkness, crawling along side of me,
was a beautiful brown-banded snake.
This was first time I had ever found a snake just by hearing, rather
than seeing, it move. And better than that, it was my first-ever
Copperhead! All in
all, a very satisfying way to cap off a great month of herping.
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