Excuse my excessive commentary, I didn't have anything else to do so heres a "short story made long" of our trip.
We headed down to south Texas last weekend to do a little herping. Didn't find much but still pretty cool!
We did 624 the first night. They installed a new drilling site out there so the traffic was very disappointing. Although we did manage to see 3 snakes, (all within 5 minutes of each other) only 1 of which was caught. The one we did see was a checkered garter and I believe one of the others was too. But the last one was some sort of whip snake or something out late, I think. It was really long and thin and of course got away before we could capture it.
The next morning we headed to Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Sanctuary. I saw a very large indigo just outside of the visitors center but it dashed away into the brush before I could even take a pic.
. We were able to photograph a few birds...
Green Jay
Kara kara
Bronzed Cowbird
Next we drove a little loop inside the sanctuary in hope of coming across another indigo. No luck but we did stumble upon this guy.
He was right on the beach:
My mom spotted this guy from the car
Gator!
That night we did a little bit of cruising around but nothing interesting.
The next morning we went to the Brownsville zoo which my dad thought had lots of natives. He was wrong about that, just a regular zoo. After getting our moneys worth we headed to the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge.
I first spotted this guy in an old irrigation canal.
Diamond Backed Water Snake
There were also plenty of frogs hopping around
Rio Grand Leopard Frog (Rana berlandieri)
The refuge turned out to be really nice and I hope to go back.
Rose-Bellied Lizard (Sceloporus variabilis marmoratus)
Shot from above the canopy:
The last night we decided to herp Jim Hogg county.
I'll first mention that because we weren't familiar with the area we made our herping plans about 12 hours in advance. Our permit states that we must tell Austin 24hrs in advance. Normally they don't enforce this rule but the lady there was very strict about it and essentially told us we couldn't herp. So we responded by saying that as long as we didn't touch anything we could still look. So she gave in and went ahead and alerted the game warden (as they always do). So, the moral: always call 24hrs ahead! Figured I'd just throw that in there after the recent permit discussion.
Back to the topic... we started by going up 1017 which looked like a really good road but yielded nothing at all. After dropping my mother off at the hotel we got a call from the warden. He said he was looking for us on 1017. We said we'd be back out there in a few minutes but he recommended 3073 and 649. So we changed our route. His friendliness was obviously a sigh of relief for us.
On our way down 1073 we came across this guy:
Coral
We eventually met up withe the warden who turned out to be a really nice guy, unlike some was educated in TX herp fauna and was able to tell us all about what was moving. He did say that he had just seen a milksnake on Wedneday and he was supprised that 1017 was so dry.
So we continued on our way. He said he'd look out for herps and call if anything was found. Pretty cool! Nothing was so we headed in at about 1:00.
PS
Heres a classic example of the TX wildlife sanctuary:
As you can see this animal is living its life to the fullest on some rednecks hat band.
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Wardens name was Earnest Maldonado
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