4-26-18

Trip Details

Location: Southeastern Iowa

Weather: 70 degrees, sunny

Time: 11:00 am to 5:00 pm

Herpers: Don Becker and Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch

This is a pretty epic report again, but I'm going to keep the text to a minimum because it is getting difficult to continue to write about this stuff.

We stopped at a couple of southeastern Iowa sites today. The first site we had visited a few times before but hadn't seen anything worth reporting. That changed today when we walked up on this adult Eastern Hognose Snake (Heterodon platirhinos). I only had my cell phone and not my camera, but here are way too many pictures and a video.

 

I used to have a major league jinx against finding these guys, but that seems to be cleared up now. It was a really pretty snake and it never rolled over to play dead.

We also found five hatchling Common Map Turtles (Graptemys geographica).

I don't see these guys that often, and seeing babies was pretty cool.

We also found a last years baby Northern Water Snake (Nerodia sipedon) under cover on the bank of a pond.

That was it and we moved on to the site where we have been finding all the massasaugas this spring. We found some, but here is the other stuff we found there.

We walked up a large Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina) out on the crawl.

We also found this three foot plus Western Fox Snake (Pantherophis vulpinus) under cover.

It was a really pretty fox snake, the head was very distinctly colored.

That's enough suspense...

Today we turned up NINE Massasauga Rattlesnakes (Sistrurus catenatus). That's just crazy. It's mindblowing. Also, we estimate seven of the nine to be new snakes we had not yet seen on our previous trips to this area. I won't go into detail of we walked here and found this one then we walked there and found that one, so here are a bunch of photos of the snakes. These shots were all taken in-situ, the snakes were not touched or moved. That's why some of the shots are partially hidden in the grass or are otherwise marginal shots.