For those of you who prefer to just watch the YT video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6iw3ruMY3M&t=5s
After returning from the Wild East (a MASSIVE herping trip in mid-May with my brother covering Texas, the Gulf, and Appalachia that I have yet to post an account for yet) to the prairies of Southwest Missouri, it took a few weeks to settle back into my work routine, clean up errands in arrears, put in trip records and make the videos from our epic brother trip, catch up on missed workouts, and find another opportunity to do some herping, with the exception of a trail system behind a show cave near a work assignment, where I got a mile or so of hiking in each lunch break for two weeks and saw a half-dozen box turtles and a few slimy salamanders in a springhouse in early June.
Three-toed Box Turtle, Stone County, MO
With July 4th off from work, though, I got a wild hair to take a rocket run west to the Red Hills region of Kansas, and throw in some turtle spots on the way back through Central KS on Saturday. On the afternoon of July 3rd, I left Southwest Missouri and found myself driving the now-familiar route of US 400 into the heart of the Kansas Flint Hills to the sound of an interesting townhall meeting in Iowa broadcast on a Christian radio station, where Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was meeting with a pro-life group, awkwardly trying to straddle the line between criticizing Donald Trump for his recent turn on abortion and not explicitly using his name. The Flint Hills are where the East ends and the west begins, where the prairie-and-woods combination of eastern KS and western MO gives way to near-treeless plains and the cattle suddenly outnumber the people, where the history-inclined traveler can envision mounted Osage and Pawnee warriors on the horizon if he squints hard enough at the empty shortgrass plains.
My first stop this sweltering 95-degree evening was a city park near downtown Wichita that purportedly housed a population of the almost fully-aquatic Midland Smooth Softshells, and though the sandy banks and sandbars of the winding, swift river looked like ideal habitat for this burrowing species, an hour-long walk along the river at just past dinnertime revealed more beer cans, cigarette butts, and sundry trash than it did turtles, or any herps at all. It was just too hot for anything to be out basking. From there, I headed west out of the Cross Timbers region and toward the setting sun, toward the Red Hills near Medicine Lodge, and stopped in at the Subway in Medicine Lodge about an hour before sunset, as some locals took up positions in front of the restaurant to watch the upcoming July 4th parade and midnight fireworks show as the clock flipped to the 4th. The real fireworks for me would take place that night and the next day.
As soon as I turned on my road-cruising route, there was an early-bird glass lizard on the pavement, not even 100 feet into the route. Although these critters are somewhat difficult to find in the prairies back home in Southwest Missouri, in the Kansas Red Hills, they are like candy at a sparsely-attended Halloween party: everywhere.
Glass Lizard, Barber County, KS
By night’s end, I would see nine, and those are the ones I bothered to stop and ID to make sure they were not snakes. Just before the sun completely set, I spotted what looked like a suspiciously well-defined rock in the road, but in the rock-less plains of western Kansas, I had a feeling this would be my first Texas Horned Lizard in a year (found one on the exact same road last July 4th, at the same time of day), and it was. What a treat these unique lizards are to see, and how sad that they have declined so dramatically east of Interstate 35.
Texas Horned Lizard, Barber County, KS
Just after seeing the Horned Lizard, the sun set splendidly over the plains, and just as the eastern expanse softened to light purple, the moon crested the horizon bright red. It was one of the most beautiful moon-rises I have ever witnessed (behind only a few moon-rises over water, like Lake Huron and Lake Superior), and for at least five minutes I only half-heartedly watched the road, more intent on taking in the transfixing and raw beauty of the red-orange moon turning to dandelion yellow, then cream, as it rose above the dimming landscape and lit the wide-open sky, with Bob Seger’s “Shame on the Moon” fittingly playing on the classic rock station I had settled on a half hour earlier (the only station that was in range). I attempted a picture, but the camera didn’t do the moment justice.
Over the next half-hour, things slowed down, but the Massasaugas emerged as the darkness set in, and I saw three by midnight.
Western Massasauga, Barber County, KS
Serendipitously, I met a Kansas herper I had previously talked to but never met, who was also cruising that night with some friends based out of Wichita, and we jointly cruised for a couple hours, sharing results on each pass. With temperatures dropping into the 70s and a breeze, I was losing hope in finding either of my target lifers for the night (Great Plains Rat and Plains Black-headed Snake) but still having a blast racking up glass lizards, Massies, and a lone Prairie Rattler. But on my last pass just before midnight, I noticed the group of herpers I mentioned earlier stopped, and they were motioning to me to stop as well. They had found a juvie Great Plains Rat! As we chatted about researchers we both knew and bandied about new taxonomic splits amongst salamanders, I photographed this lifer snake and watched my step for Prairie Rattlers (recall the anecdote about this same road and the abundance of Prairie Rattlers from 2022!).
Great Plains Ratsnake, Barber County, KS
With a good first night in the books, I headed for the small town of Pratt just to get a few hours shut-eye before the next day, which promised to be sweltering, with temps hitting 100 shortly after 2pm. If I was going to find anything good, it would have to happen before about 11:00am when the temperature skyrocketed past 90. Unfortunately for my sleeping idea, fireworks didn’t cease until almost 2am. Pratt, Kansas is a patriotic place.
The next morning, I awoke groggy before the sunrise, unable to get back to sleep, and picked up a rare coffee to make the early morning drive through the wheat and soy fields between Pratt and my next stop, Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, and heard a new Randy Travis song, “Too Gone For Too Long,” the upbeat and hopeful yet wistful mood of which seemed to suit the last twelve hours perfectly, between the radio hosts’ (mostly inane and elementary-level) July 4th fun facts on a classic country station. Just before my arrival, the sun rose over wide-open farm country. To the extent there is anything redeeming about living in rural Kansas (or the Great Plains in general), it must be the quality of the sunrises and sunsets.
Quivira NWR (I feel comfortable being specific here because I found nothing particularly rare here) is an interesting spot, like someone picked up a few square miles of Louisiana or Florida tidal marsh and transplanted it to the Sunflower State. The first rays of orange morning sun revealed massive flocks of water birds in the mud flats and the shallower portions of the marsh, some of which consisted of exotic species like the Black-necked Stilt, American Avocet, and Hooded Oriole, other flocks that were dominated by more common marsh birds like herons, bitterns, and egrets, as well as some water-dwelling mammals like muskrats and beavers. But like any herper worth his salt, the size of the flocks got me wondering how many small fish and frogs must be in the marsh, and thus how many turtles and Nerodia that also prey in part on the same things.
Between sunrise and 8am, I saw nothing. I started to think that perhaps the predominately dry weather of the last two weeks, combined with the impending heat, was keeping all the herps down despite the rain the night before. But as the temperature rose past 75, I found the following while road cruising in a single hour, between 8 and 9am: two Ornate Box Turtles, a Red-sided Garter, a Spiny Softshell, and two of my lifer Plains Garters. Despite not seeing my most-wanted lifer at this spot (Yellow Mud Turtle), seeing some of the more common stuff (especially the Ornate Box Turtles) was fun, and the Plains Garter was a solid second lifer for this rocket run.
Plains Garternsnake, Quivira NWR
Ornate Box Turtle, Quivira NWR
With that, I headed east to try a second time for the Smooth Softshells that had eluded me the previous afternoon at the city park in Wichita, hoping the day wasn’t getting too hot already, and saw this heart-breaker DOR Bullsnake on the ride back toward the I-35 corridor:
DOR Bullsnake, Central KS
In a small town northwest of Wichita around 10:30am, the high heat and humidity didn’t deter throngs from attending a 4th of July parade of the city’s firetrucks and police cars, which caused me to detour through downtown toward a spot along the Arkansas River. At first, it seemed like a replay of the afternoon before: temperatures were already eclipsing 90 degrees, and not only was I not seeing softshells, but I was not seeing any turtles at all. But after moving downriver a few hundred yards to a kayak put-in point (where I am sure that the kayakers were perplexed as to what someone in a rattlesnake hat and boots with a long camera lens was doing) and scanning the other bank carefully, I saw what appeared to be two turtle shells, one more domed, the other nearly flat. Sure enough, looking through my binoculars, it was clear that one was a Red-eared slider, and the other a Midland Smooth Softshell! I crept up slowly, getting another picture about every 10 yards until I was as close as I could get, still about 30 yards away on the opposite bank, far enough not to get a crystal-clear picture, but close enough for an acceptable one. The Smooth softshell was basking just above a fast-flowing section of stream with a sandbar adjacent, was smaller than most spiny softshells I’ve seen, and had a line on the side of its head.
Midland Smooth Softshell and Slider, Central KS
Midland Smooth Softshell, Central KS
After setting up the tripod and getting some video of the softshell, the main turtle target of the trip, I headed back to the car to have some lunch, and decided to hit an Ouachita Map Turtle spot in the city of Wichita, but had low expectations, as temperatures were now nearing 95. After about forty-five minutes of walking the river’s edge and scanning logs with the binoculars, I decided to check the most obvious place, the rocks under the bridge, where the sun wasn’t beating down 100%. Hilariously, there were three turtles basking, two sliders and one Ouachita Map Turtle!! The only one that didn’t go in before I got close enough for pictures was, thankfully, my map turtle. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good…
Ouachita Map Turtle, Wichita, Kansas
With that, I decided to head home early rather than wait 7 hours for temperatures to moderate at twilight, when I could take a shot at Broad-banded Copperhead, and instead just got back to SW Missouri in time to have dinner at home and work out like normal. All in all, it was a great rocket run. Twenty-four hours, four lifers, and a great time listening to music, feeling my freedom as our nation celebrated the 246th anniversary of its freedom from Great Britain, and exploring new corners of one of America’s most underrated herping states. I am definitely going to spend at least one or two Saturdays in the wonderful Sunflower State next spring.
Summer Herping 2023 (late May-end of July)-BETWEEN THE EPIC TRIPS
Moderator: Scott Waters