5-03-08

Trip Details

Location: Northeastern Missouri

Conditions: Windy and cool, high in the upper 50's

Time: 11:00 am thru 6:00 pm

Herpers: Ryan Thies, Jim Scharosch

Photos and account by Jim Scharosch

I decided to make another swing thru Missouri looking for a "picture perfect" speckled kingsnake. My first stop though was to meet up with Ryan Thies and take another crack at a crayfish snake. We had tried last year, and found one, but it was in shed and wasn't really nice enough to photograph.

I met up with Ryan and we drove out to one of his crayfish snake spots. The weather wasn't very nice, it was spitting rain and it was windy and cold. The water was high, which seemed like it might help by pushing the snakes up out of the rocks. It seemed like a good theory, but it didn't quite work out that way. We didn't see anything at this spot.

We moved on to a different location, pretty much giving up on finding crayfish snakes.

We worked a tin site and found some Ring-necked Snakes (Diadophis punctatus).

You know it's a slow day when you start taking pictures of ring-necked snakes.

A little later, Ryan turned up this nice Milk Snake (Lampropeltis triangulum)

Here's Ryan with the milk snake.

We worked some other areas, and didn't turn up much. Here is a Northern Water Snake (Nerodia sipedon) that we found.

We flipped a lot of rocks, and walked a lot of ground. It's too bad the weather wasn't cooperative. Ryan and I discussed some loose plans for next spring. I want to take another shot at the crayfish snakes, so I probably will get back down there.