Field Herp Forum

Good luck Dave, and watch the Drought Monitor maps. There are a few west TX counties right now that are not in drought, and also a belt of really terrible ("Exceptional, D4") drought. And lots of everything in between. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?South The Apri...

They breeze in, they take what they can get, and mostly you never hear from them again. Sigh / meh.

How you doin'?

Also, I know it’s still a little early in the year for road cruising but would it be worth at least giving it a shot? (Nighttime temps in the desert areas will be around the mid 50’s) Sure it's worth making a few passes in the low elevations. Winders are crazy cold tolerant, and you will probably s...

Well I sure look forward to them.

I also hope you blundered into lots of vipers while looking for ratsnakes. I really enjoyed your Shennongjia (or something like that???) series of posts that included e.g. Protobothrops jerdonii.

Thanks very much for the post, Scott. Very interesting, that creek sounds like a fun walk.

And Kevin - I also miss your China posts! I like the food stuff almost as much as the herp stuff, and find the culture and geography stuff maybe the best of all.

how tight they stuck to the flooded habitat. Like never left it I mean it's just crazy how well common names sometimes work. Ha ha. Isn't that cool? I just love it. @OP - I've done alright cruising adult muds in the summer rain. They come out and crawl around in the rain, after dark. I've also done...

the board getting swept away in a big rain

Trivial problem if you take countermeasures. Use a metal stake, a short length of chain or cable, and a pair of stainless swivels (like for marine fishing). Ever seen a leg-hold set? Same idea. "Don't let it get away."

good luck!

Archives are your friend:

viewtopic.php?t=12175

Another month or so and the start of SC prime time will be upon you. I'm a little jealous.

good hunting!

Nice bunch of pics, Jeff. Thank you! With the wet winter you guys had, I had been wondering what spring was like down there. And due to Covid crap, I just stayed pretty close to home this spring - and due to our terrible drought, it sucked royally up here, for me. So congrats on all the fun times th...

Nice finds & pics - thanks for sharing. My dream of some day visiting Taiwan endures. Between the culture & people, the natural history, and the scenery, it's an extremely appealing destination.

I also didn't know you guys have Daboia. So thanks for that too.

cheers

probably somewhere in the 20-25" range Wow - that's a monster! I think streckeri is the smallest subspecies. I used to keep two adult pairs, and got a few litters out of them. All four of my adults were in the 16-20" range. Pretty stout, could happily eat full-grown adult domestic mice. But they di...

Hey, congrats!!! Classic little streckeri. What was he, maybe 12" long?

"If you can hear the rattle, your ear is too close!" Ha ha ha. Cute little toe-stabbers, huh?

to gauge whether pit vipers in general are moving yet, logic being that if Pigs aren't moving yet in Southwest MO, their Massasauga cousins 250 miles west in Kansas probably aren't either I think maintaining some monitoring effort on that "home road" is very wise, simply to get to know it and your ...

“We are likely on the path of accelerated sea level rise” “We have to invent a new worst-case climate warming scenario, because Greenland is already tracking the current one.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-arctic/greenlands-ice-sheet-saw-record-mass-loss-in-2019-study-finds-idUS...

here's hoping the Pigmies I've never really looked for pigs west of the Mississippi, and the little I've done there was just unrequited walking & flipping, but knowing them just a little in GA & SC (where they are also very spotty & can be tough, like they seem further west) they seemed more reliab...

Thanks for the posts & pics, I enjoy seeing you two getting out and just getting along in life. (Unsolicited thus possibly hated advice - rack 'em up before you have kids, if you're so inclined! You will have no time or money for anything but the yard apes, once you go there.) So - I have zero actua...

I turned into a "camping" wus in old age and now my wife and I use this: Love it. The fiberglass trailers hold a lot of appeal for me. I'm still a "tent / truck shell / hell just throw down a tarp & puss pad and call it good" kind of camper. But - I live in the West where it's dry & (for now anyway...

I've been pretty badly skunked in the Davis mountains a few times, when I went before the late summer rains had started. I don't go there any more in June; I just mentally lump that area in with the other "monsoon-season" places. Edwards Plateau is different. I asked a guy here about flipping little...

A very useful phone APP we use in the east, but probably works out west, is "HUNTSTAND". It's useful because it can show who's land you are on. OnX ("onyx") might be similar to HUNTSTAND. It costs money but the developers have gone to the trouble of gathering parcel / landowner data from all the co...

Craig, do you have access to Herp Review? I think the observation was made right around dark, in mid May 2017. About 9 PM. Sounded like they walked it, or shined it - not cruised-on-road.

cheers

Thanks for the heads-up Bob, I will have to watch for the upcoming Herp Review pub on boas in Sonora.

And congrats also, to Chris G on his perspicacity.

As an extreme non-cnemidologist, and going by gestalt, I'm going with velox too. The very clean dark fields - no tesselations - are the main nudge (most cnemis have some degree of checkering). But I also live in a state with extremely low teiid species diversity, and velox lives here. So I'm primed ...

Many of those individuals - if they are not indeed of the same individual) depicted are pretty clearly in the same age cohort (further south I'd say 2019 hatch year; maybe slower/older up there?) Basically, they look like last year's 2-footers (they hatch at a foot, and normally grow about a foot a ...

And just in today, evidence that most Americans aren't buying the horseshit any more: Two-Thirds of Americans Think Government Should Do More on Climate Bipartisan backing for carbon capture tax credits, extensive tree-planting efforts https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of-ame...

And now for our morally superior, foundational-values endowed brethren, more current news from the climate front: source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2767260?utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=061820 content: Original Investi...

And 'cause I feel like hitting this one more time - horseshit don't float. It just kind of waterlogs, then it crumbles and sinks, and leaves you with nothing but dirty water. You can try to set it down carefully, you can blow on it to try and keep it dry, why hell - you can even paint it with Shinol...

Source for the following (where you can also click links to get to the scientific papers by Oreskes, Doran, et al.): https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-advanced.htm Authors of seven climate consensus studies — including Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, William Anderegg, ...

While the horseshit cart went rolling on, spilling its little road apples all over the place, out in the real world this happened: source: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202005 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/May-2020-Global-Temperature-Percentiles-Map.png Note, this is ...

What a would-be demagogue you are, Ernie. Here's what AAAS & Science magazine offer about Happer: Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/physicist-leading-trump-s-adversarial-climate-review-also-led-group-touting-carbon Content: Physicist leading Trump’s ‘adversarial’ climate review also le...

(Ernie, at this point in a beat down, it's customary to stay down. We've all made our points, anything more would just be embarrassing. Let's stick a fork in this one.)

allowing the scientist themselves to tell their story, (is) a far preferable option, Indeed. Here's twenty two of his MIT colleagues - well, they were his colleagues there before he retired, saying something. Source: http://climate-science.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/LetterTrump1.png Seems p...

Oh look, here comes the manure cart guy again, fetching another load of aged horseshit, topped with just a little pungent material of his own issue. - The video clip is from 2013. - Here's something newer (2019) about the speaker & his place of employment: source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...

Your pathological - perhaps conscious, perhaps subconscious - aversion to honesty cannot fail to impress me. In the bad way, yes, but it is impressive. 1) Roy Spencer is "a real scientist", with a PhD in meteorology. He did great work at NASA with temperature-monitoring satellites back in the 80s an...

Same old story, same old song and dance. You're a one-trick tired old nag, but still a seriously dependable horseshit producer. Good for you, you're just so amazingly full of shit!!! Source: https://skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm What evidence is there for the hockey stick? What the sc...

my underlying goal has been to try and urge individuals to keep an open mind In an earlier era of "the culture wars", righties used to say of lefties "Oh those poor dummies - look, their minds are so open their brains fell out". My my, how the wheel turns in ironic ways. Or maybe it was just projec...

Well, a hot day is just a hot day, a hot night is just a hot night. But stack up enough of them over a few decades, and hell yeah something not funny is going on. In the 10 full years since the 2009 "climategate" full-on horseshit mentioned by what's his nuts - and recall, at that time, 2009 was the...

As for so-called ClimateGate, try FactCheck https://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/ Summary In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate s...

A blast from the past indeed. Good to see you're doing well. And as far as lizards go, they don't get too much cooler than this Yellow-spotted Night Lizard (Lepidophyma flavimaculatum): Yeah buddy; just a great genus all in all. If it weren't for the bugs, it would be a nice place: Yeah, but...hahah...

From what I read it doesn't seem to argue "the Earth is not warming" so much as it argues "Yes, the Earth is warming, but we're unsure how much more it will warm or how unprecedented this is." That's from the standard deniers' playbook. The next play is "well, we still don't know why it's warming s...

More from the weather - "warming has increased the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a major one of Category 3 or higher, with sustained winds greater than 110 miles an hour, by about 8 percent a decade." So since 1979 the odds of a hurricane going major have increased about 26%. Nice one, h...

As for this: it is best to let the scientific research continue to explore these issues as well as letting the weather tell its own story in coming years Well, the weather is indeed telling its own story. Always has, always will. Hey, the Atlantic hurricane season is now off to an earlier-than-usual...

This is probably the second-most used climate change denier myth. the topic of grand solar minimum The source for the following pasted material: https://skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-advanced.htm Sun & climate: moving in opposite directions What the science says... In t...

Yes, the Sonoran (influence) comes up to that area. Yours looks like the classic intergrade from what I can see in the pic. +1, some you see there are leaning stronger to the Sonoran phenotype but really, it's an intergrade zone. I distinctly recall walking in on about a 65" beast female in the BPC...

In Utah at the federal level it seems to be a USDA / USDI thing: NPS and BLM campgrounds have been closed but USFS campgrounds have been open. A few of our Colorado Plateau counties have closed their (federal public lands) backcountries to dispersed camping because there's only a dozen or two hospit...

Heads up: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?West The Klamath / Siskiyou country is looking rough, drought-wise. Would love to see the 2 Lampropeltis down there. Its an area I have only passed through in the past. That country is worth spending some time in. Getula al...

everything fun is closed

Hey, the Great Basin is wide open. All the distance you need.

Thanks for taking the time, Bill. I just couldn't deal with the goofiness. It's a matter of evidence, not of opinion.

cheers

That cotton is a real nice one.

Indeed indeed. Seems like the farthest-northeast ones are, on average, the best of anywhere, looks-wise.

That water snake must have had a real wrestling match to subjugate the bullfrog. Especially on the kicking end. Jeez.

Careful, some stuff is pretty touchy! The biggest "problem" with New England is, even taxa that are superabundant (e.g. racers) further south can be extremely localized, and sometimes occur in really small populations up there. Hey (assuming you don't already - sorry if mistaken) if you want to part...