Kenny wanted to see an Eastern fox snake, Pantherophis vulpina gloydi, because it would be a lifer for him and I wanted to see it just because I wanted to see it.



I had seen this species before, but I never tire of seeing herps in the wild, so we were somewhere along the southern shore of Lake Erie in northern Ohio. We walked through a beautiful park where the Eastern fox snake was said to be common. We failed to find one there. We were now walking a breakwater that had jumbles of boulders for its entire length and a fairly dense tree canopy for most of its length.

We walked for more than a mile without seeing as much as a garter snake and then, having decided to try our luck elsewhere, turned to return to the car. The morning lake fog that kept temperatures a bit cool was now burning off and the boulder jumbles not shaded by the trees were beginning to warm - but still no fox snakes.

Ahead of us the area opened up to a boulder-rimmed parking lot, the near side of which had a couple of huge spreading oaks. I decided to go and look at the acorns, and as I neared the tree I almost stepped on an adult fox snake that had just emerged from between two boulders.

I called to Kenny but he was now determined to find his own and declined to come look at mine, which, it turned out was a smart decision. Just as he made another step he hollered, "Here's one," and a couple of moments later, "here's another."

First target of the day found. Westward Ho!

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"Gordy! Will you look at this! This turtle has a red belly!"



The place was somewhere south of Ringwood, New Jersey. The time was back in the 1950s. The occasion was me seeing my first red-bellied turtle of any species. My companion was my friend and mentor, E. Gordon (Gordy) Johnston (now deceased).

I was 14 or 15 years old on my first herping jaunt away from home. It was memorable because we had already seen more Eastern box turtles than I had ever guessed existed, we saw an Eastern king snake, and visited Asa Pittman and seen his collection of Northern pine snakes and "Coastal Plains" milk snakes. Now I had just hand-caught what I thought to be a hatchling painted turtle only to find it was a Northern red-bellied turtle, Pseudemys rubriventris.

And to top it off, that night we camped in a little deserted Pine Barrens cabin and were serenaded all night long by whip-poor-wills and screech owls. What an occasion for a herp loving kid!

Since then, I have seen many Northern red-bellied turtles, and although I marveled at each and every one of them, none have stuck in memory like that first one. I can still see myself darting from the damp shoreline into the shallows to grab that little "painted turtle" I had just startled only to find it was something so very different that I hadn't then known it even existed.

That's herping at its very, very, best.

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When I was a kid in Springfield, Massachucets, smooth green snakes, Opheodrys vernalis, were among my most cherished serpentine finds. I never considered them common.



In fact, they were otherwise. But with sufficient dedication I could usually find one or two hiding beneath a piece of damp newspaper or a flat stone in some urban vacant lot. Even after I had outgrown the "kid stage" by two or three decades, smooth green snakes were still findable in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and as far west as the Dakotas and New Mexico.

Fast forward to today. Although these pretty little insectivores can still be found here and there over their huge range, if information is correct, some populations have been extirpated. In other locations, where the snake was once common, they have seemingly become rare.

A friend considers them abundant in Wisconsin, but in several areas of Michigan, Maine, and Massachusetts where they were once seen annually, none have been seen for years. This is also true in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, and other portions of their always disjunct range.

I guess that what I am asking is this: are smooth green snakes significantly more rare, or are we, as aging and aged adults whose sight may not be as acute as it once was, merely overlooking these grass blade lookalikes?

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Xenodon (Waglerophis) merremi, the giant false viper, is a variably colored and patterned dipsadine snake that has several well-developed defensive mechanisms including body inflation or hood spreading, hissing, and striking.



In these actions, this three and one-half foot long snake is much like North American hog-nosed snakes. Unlike the hog-noses, which are reluctant to bite, the false viper displays no such hesitancy. It is an opisthoglyphid species with enlarged teeth at the rear of the upper jaw and a venom that quickly immobilizes its anuran prey, and which can be painful to humans should they be bitten.

This is an oviparous species and clutches between fifteen and thirty-nine eggs have been recorded. Hatchlings, juveniles, and subadults usually bear light edged hourglass shaped bands that are darker than the ground color. Once adult, the pattern fades and many of the older adults are basically an overall dark olive-gray with a light fleck on each scale.

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Of the 5 subspecies of copperheads, Agkistrodon contortrix, I had seen four in the field. I still lacked the Osage form, A. c. phaeogaster.



It seemed that the Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma home range of this, the northwesternmost of the five subspecies, was just a bit out of my normal scope of roaming. When Kenny and I found ourselves herping Kansas a couple of years ago, the Osage copperhead became an eagerly sought snake.

Friends told us to do this or do that and we would be unable to miss seeing the pretty snake, but we had been told this for other taxa and some of these "sure things" not only initially failed but we were, years later, still looking. We had a nice relaxing trip to central Kansas, found a lot of snakes, and were now driving a long route back to Florida via eastern Kansas and central Texas.

We had plenty of time to stop and search for copperheads. We straggled into northeastern Kansas and barely turned southward when we noticed a rocky wooded spot such as we had been told to watch for. We stopped, hopped out, turned a half dozen rocks, found two burrowing crayfish, some plains ring-necked snakes, and ---what do you know-- our target, a beautiful two-foot-long Osage copperhead.

Although we looked for and found more on the way south, the finding of that first one was for both Kenny and me the most exciting. It rounded out an already great trip.

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We were a couple of nights into our Peruvian Amazon tour and the group, 10 field-herpers including me, had decided that this would be a good night to try to see a caiman or two.



We all piled excitedly into the Amazon equivalent of a John-boat and were, with our Peruvian guide, motoring slowly into a quiet oxbow that was outlined with overhanging shrubs and had great patches of emergent vegetation protruding from the shallows. Flashlight beams probed the darkness, each hoping that it would be their beam that found the reflective eyes of the caiman and each wondering whether it would be a "caiman blanco" (the local name for the spectacled caiman, Caiman crocodilus) or the more uncommon "caiman negro" (the black caiman, Melanosuchus niger) that would be the first to be found.

We didn't have to wait long to find out. The boat edged carefully around a fallen tree and ahead was eyeshine. The lights of all but the guide in the prow were turned out (this prevented the guide from being silhouetted and easily seen by the caiman).

Slowly, slowly, the boat edged forward and the prowman whispered "blanco." We were approaching a spectacled caiman. A quick grab by the prowman and the 24 inch long caiman, a lifer for many of the tour participant, was passed back for us all to see.

But there was an extra added attraction here because it quickly became apparent that the surprised (but unharmed) caiman had a half-swallowed something in its mouth. And after a couple of convulsive hiccups by the caiman the something disgorged proved to be a 15 inch long snake--a beautiful snake bearing narrow rings of black, red, and white. A coral snake? No. A coral mud snake, Hydrops martii, a second and very unexpected lifer found in a most unorthodox manner!

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About 10 of us had bunked down in the dormitory on Santa Cruz Forest Reserve on the banks of the Rio Mazan, about an hour and a half north of Iquitos, Peru. We had arrived earlier in the day after traveling southward from Madre Selva Biological Preserve on the more northerly Rio Orosa where we spent the last 5 days.

After several herp-filled hours in the field at Santa Cruz, most of us were were more than ready to call it a night. But it seemed that some of the herps weren't.



It began raining an hour earlier making use of digital cameras in the field difficult. Since we do allow some field collecting to assure that all tour participants have an opportunity to photo all herps found, there was a bag or two that contained snakes in the dorm. All would be photographed and released the following day.

Suddenly, from one end of the pitch black dorm came the query "Did one of you lose a snake?" Flashlights came on. Bags were checked. The answers from beneath 3 mosquito nets were "no," "no," and "no." All bags were secure.

"Well, I think there's a snake next to my bunk."

Instantaneously awake, we all clambered down to the far end of the dorm and, sure enough, stretched over the loose end of Jerry's mosquito netting was a beautiful 4 foot long Brazilian rainbow boa, Epicrates c. cenchria (these were once thought to be the Peruvian subspecies, E. c. gaigeae, but have now been synonymized with their better known Brazilian counterpart). We had seen several during that evening's walk and since everyone had taken photos, our visitor was taken outside and released.

You just can't help but love the Amazon.

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Have you ever heard that old saying, "A frog is a frog is a frog"?

What? You haven't? Well, fret not! I don't think that I've ever heard it either. In fact, I'm neither sure that anybody has heard it, nor that it was ever said. But it is a truism. Just look at any ranid frog up here in the USA and then compare Rana palmipes, the Neotropical green frog of Amazonia, and the similarities are immediately apparent.



Lately, rather than a question of appearance, my question has become one of abundance of the latter species. One time, and one time only (20 years ago), in one locale on the Rio Nanay, I found dozens of this pretty taxon. But since then I have neither seen nor heard of this species being found in Amazonian Peru. As folks are now wont to say, what's up with that? This has just become a January 2015 target taxon!

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