9-21-15

Trip Details

Location: Jackson County, Iowa

Weather: Low seventies, light winds

Time: 6:00 PM

Herpers: David Becker, Don Becker, Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch

We made another stop at an area we have been working at and visiting all summer long. We had been watching the female timbers at the rookery areas and I knew it was past time that they should have dropped some babies. One of the local farm cats was following us around everywhere we went.

We stopped at the lower rookery rock first and we could see the two larger Timber Rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) that had been basking there throughout the summer.

They were tucked under the rock a bit. One of them started to rattle when we were still a good distance away, which was a bit odd as they were under cover and had not rattled at all during our previous visits when we were closer to them ad they were both warmer and much more exposed. As expected, we saw a few babies hanging close to the rock.

We weren’t able to tell for sure how many were visible, but it looked like possibly four.

We moved up the hill to the second rookery and again there were babies crawling around the rock.

We guessed that there were probably six or so.

There was also one adult snake.

We went up to the densite and saw one small adult timber basking on a ledge. There was also a little bit of one timber showing thru in a small crevice. I didn't take any photos of these guys.

We walked around a bit, the cat still following us. We found another smaller timber under a ledge. The cat was oblivious to all the snakes we had found and laid down on top of the rock as we were taking photos. It was pretty funny.

That was all we saw that day. It’s funny how we used to think that seeing three timbers here was an amazing day. Today we saw around sixteen and didn’t think much of it.