Meet an upset Mohave rattler.
Again came the now familiar cry -- "snake!" But this time it was I who noticed the hefty serpent at road edge. Either a western diamondback or a Mohave rattler-- and it proved to be a 3 1/2 foot long example of the latter.

Jake had been getting a few minutes of shuteye before we reached our chosen hunting area. We expected it to be a long night as we searched out the anurans. The torrential rains that had fallen for the last 2 hours has stopped but the desert was soaked, dry creeks were raging and playas were filled. My yell jerked Jake instantly awake and by the time I had stopped the car he was piling out.

Mohave rattlesnakes (yes, it's now spelled with an "h" and not a "j"), Crotalus s. scutulatus, have reputations for having bad tempers and this one was certainly living up to that reputation. The hefty snake had begun striking the moment Jake had stepped from the car. Not only did the snake strike so hard that it slid forward each time on the wet and slippery road, but the striking was incessant, causing Jake to take couple of involuntary steps backward from the pavement. Of course this brought him (equally involuntarily) into an unexpected rear attack by formidably armed "monkey-get-back-bushes" (mesquite, cats claw, and beaver-tail cacti). Then and there Jake performed an impromptu rendition of that horrid old dance the we old timers refer to as the "green-apple-quickstep." Jake proved far more agile than I had credited him to be!

But eventually Jake's perseverance prevailed, photos of the Mohave were taken and we were on our way again.

More photos under the jump

Hatchling and juvenile Baird's rat snakes have prominent saddles
"Snake!"

Jake had grimmaced as I stopped again to photograph the ever-changing and increasingly beautiful West Texas sunset. Within minutes I was back on the road and traffic was still quite light. We dipped and had started up a gentle incline when a female striped skunk with 5 trailing kits started across the road. As I slowed the female bolted leaving 5 very confused skunklets milling around. I stopped and moved the kits from the pavement into the roadside grass. Whoops. Guess I got sprayed. Jake was really grimmacing now--and holding his throat and hanging out the window. This had all the makings of a great night.

I was back up to cruising speed now and still extolling the beauty of the sunset and the skunks when Jake hollered "snake." It was a good thing that one of us was watching the road. I stopped, backed up and there sure was a snake--and it was a silver-blue beauty--3 feet of Baird's rat snake, Pantherophis bairdi. This beautiful constrictor may attain an adult length of 5 feet, is the westernmost representative of the Pantherophis obsoletus complex, and is certainly one of the prettiest.

This is a pretty but pale Big Bend western diamond-back.
Where were the western diamond-backed rattlesnakes, Crotalus atrox? Jake and I began asking ourselves that question on our first night in Val Verde County, TX, and continued wondering throughout our 10 nights in West Texas. We were no closer to an answer on that 10th night than we had been on the first. We knew only that 14 months earlier (August 2014) we had seen more western diamond-backed rattlers than any other snake species. And that over the years I had found this to often be the case. We found diamond-backs from the time of night that the desert had cooled enough to allow snake movement until the wee hours of the morning when, if we looked eastward, we could see the first evidence of a new dawn. We found them crossing the roadway. We found them quietly coiled, as if basking, on the pavement. We even found them stretched fully out as they swallowed prey, often a kangaroo rat. In other words, there was no shortage of Crotalus atrox. It was other rattlers, black-tails, rock, and Mohave that we had been difficult to see.

But now, a year later, our findings were very different. It was mid-June and we were seeing very few of these big, usually feisty, rattlers. In fact during the 10 days we were in the range of the taxon we saw only 4 C. atrox . 3 were prowling and 1 was coiled in ambush position in a small cave in a low rock cut.

I do have to mention though that where we had seen western diamond-backs a year earlier, we were now encountering rock rattlers in fair numbers, many black-tails. and a few Mohaves. Although the reasons for this species shift remain unclear we actually found the tradeoff quite satisfactory. And I'm already wondering what next year's trip will bring?

More photos under the jump

Our trip had been replete with rattlesnakes. The roadways and rockcuts in the Big Bend area had offered up a western diamond-back or two, a few Mohave rattlers, many black-tailed rattlers and a sufficient number of mottled rock rattlers to keep things really interesting. We had found rock rattlers having pearl gray ground colors on some cuts, those having a bluish-gray ground color on other cuts. and Kenny had found and shown us one from a more westerly cut that resembled a banded rock rattler as much, or perhaps even more, than it did the mottled subspecies.

But the ones that most caught my attention had an olive-fawn ground color with faint pinkish overtones and warm brown irregular barring. In color they looked far more like the rock rattlers from the rather distant Davis Mountains than the populations nearest to the snakes at hand. And their colors camouflaged them more effectively than those of any of the other populations we visited.

Judge for yourselves how inconspicuous the warm overtones rendered these rattlers when they were lying quietly amidst the rocks and soils of their natural habitat.

For us the question quickly became how many had we overlooked rather than how many we actually saw.

More photos under the jump

While we sat in Study Butte eating the evening meal, the sky darkened. For the last hour or so lightning had been flashing east of us and we had heard a very occasional rumble of thunder. Suddenly the wind picked up and the outside was obliterated by a dust storm. Driven by the lusty gusts a self-opening tent scooted by. It was followed closely by a young lady attempting to recorral the errant canvas. Then quiet. The wind dropped, the tent was caught by the chaser, and a bolt of cloud to ground lightning followed immediately by a deafening clap of thunder--the desert storm was upon and around us. And as every herper knows, a desert storm of any significance (and even many of lesser impact) means amphibians. Amphibians emerge from nooks, crannies, and burrows to set up very temporary housekeeping in the newly formed, very ephemeral, desert pools.

While monitoring nearby rainfalls on his iPhone, Jake determined that the strongest storms had been about 50 miles away. So off we went, reaching the area a few minutes before sunset. It took just a few minutes to learn that almost every swale was in flash-flood stage and only a few more minutes to determine that huge pools now sat atop desert flats that had until only a few hours earlier been long parched. We knew then that our choice had been a good one.

By nightfall a few tentative anuran vocalizations were heard. Among the first to call were the Couch's spadefoots, Scaphiopus couchii. Shortly thereafter red-spotted toad, Bufo punctatus, had joined the spadefoots in chorus. By full darkness the voices of western green toads, Bufo debilis insidior, and Texas toads, B. speciosus, had been added and the roadway was fairly seething with all 4 anuran species.

It was a night that we would long remember.

More photos under the jump

Another year of lyre snake failure for me!
So, what else is new?

After 50 years of unsuccessfully looking for this little opisthoglyph in Texas' Big Bend region if I had found one I would probably have keeled over from shock. Other searchers though -- mostly the participants of the "Sanderson Snake Days" event, were successful in finding a Chihuahuan lyre snake, Trimorphodon vilkinsonii, and at least one person found 2! In other words these little snakes were found on all sides of Jake and me, but we were never in quite the right position at the right time. For example:

Jake and I had slowly and repeatedly driven an area at which dozens of lyres had been found over the years. Then tiring of that routine we added an extra few miles to one cruise. When we returned, about 20 minutes later, we learned that not one but two of the snakes had been found in the 20 minutes we were gone. A day or two later, on that same trip we were again cruising and hoping. A friend from California was also cruising the road, he in search of gray-banded kingsnakes. He found no kings but watched a Chihuahuan lyre snake cross the road and disappear into the rocky abyss on the south side. We were about 10 minutes behind him and we found neither king nor lyre. You get the idea. We were totally ineffectual.

Well, at least Sky (who had a research permit for the taxon) let me photograph her find, and next year (2016), all things being equal, I'll give it another try. What the heck--even an old herper needs a goal.

More photos under the jump. >

Hatchling Reeve's turtles Chinemys reevesi usually have a yellow facial pattern
When I was a kid there used to be 5 and 10 cent stores--real ones where you could but things for 5 or 10 cents or more. Some of the stores were small, some were huge, and all were places of wonderment to a youngster. And among the wonders offered were the little "Japanese coin turtles" in the pet departments. These little dark-colored turtles would show up only periodically, usually after the supplies of "green turtles" (red eared sliders) and "gray turtles" (Mississippi map turtles) had been exhausted. I'm not sure how long it was before , or even how, I learned that the proper name for the coin turtle was Reeve's turtle, or that its scientific name was then Chinemys reevesi (today it is known as the Chinese pond turtle or the Chinese three-keeled pond turtle and has been reclassified as Mauremys reevesi) but learn it I did. But I do know that it didn't take me long to learn that these little 49c turtles seemed even easier to keep than the American species that they seasonally replaced.

I hadn't thought of a Reeve's turtle for several decades but for reasons unknown I began thinking of them a few weeks ago. It took a while to find a breeder of this species but thanks to the aquatic turtle classifieds on Kingsnake.com I succeeded and, yes, they had a few hatchlings (but sadly they were more than 49c each). But with that said, guess what the FedEx driver delivered to me this morning.

Now all I need is a tiny plastic turtle tank bedecked with a proportionately tiny plastic palm tree. Reliving childhood-- but just kidding about that old-timey turtle tank!

More pictures under the jump!

Hatchling Texas banded gecko Coleonyx brevisWhat a difference a little rain makes. Last year (2014) when Jake and I made a 12 day jaunt to Texas' Big Bend region in late August dryness had prevailed. We did well with herp-diversity but one normally often seen taxon, the little Texas banded gecko, Coleonyx brevis, had proven difficult to find. In fact, we saw only 4, 2 adults and 2 hatchlings, on the entire trip.

But on the June 2015 trip, on each of the several days allocated for nighttime road-cruising, we saw from 2 to 10 of the little geckos, more on the damp nights than on dry ones. It seemed that the sightings were back to normal in frequency.

The Texas banded gecko is actually a common little nocturnal lizard. When moving they tend to stand rather high on their legs and to wag their tail. They could conceivably be mistaken for a scorpion or a mouse when in the glow of headlights the lizards are seen darting across a desert roadway. Juveniles of both sexes and adult females tend to be the more prominently banded while the bands of adult males often have irregular edges and the overall pattern may be more reticulate.

In the time span we were in Texas we saw 20 or 30 of these delightful lizards. Seeing these helped transform the trip from merely mediocre to a resounding success.

For more pictures, click below.