8-21-11

Trip Details

Location: Iowa County

Weather: Mostly sunny, highs in the low eighties.

Time: 11:00 a.m.

Herpers: Jeff LeClere, Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch

Jeff and I knew today probably wasn't going to be very productive since it was late August, but we thought it would be fun to get out anyway. We went to an area in Iowa County that Matt and I had discovered and visited a few times already this year. It was a strange spot, there was a lot of artificial cover and good habitat, but we really hadn't found much there.

After about ten minutes of turning cover, we turned a large piece of plywood and found a Milksnake (Lampropeltis triangulum).

It was about two feet long and was a fairly nice coloration. It was warm and didn't really want to sit for photos, so we snapped a couple of quick shots and returned it to its hiding place.

We returned to flipping cover materials, and under one board, we found three Plains Garter Snakes (Thamnophis radix). We don't find a lot of plains garters, so we grabbed them up to take a couple of pictures. Two were fairly typical.

This first snake was fairly thick as you can see in the photo. As we were handling it for photographs, it regurgitated a large baby rodent. We could tell there were still more in the snake, so we let it go quickly after that so it wouldn't regurgitate any more. The baby rodent was as thick as my finger and probably two inches long. It was a pretty good sized meal for this sixteen inch long garter snake.

The other one had a lot of red coloration. You can see it in the color between the scales on the back.

There also was a lot of red on the ventral scales. Even the eye was red. It was a cool looking snake.

This was the last find of this spot. We moved on to another location where we usually find Green Snakes, but we struck out there. We went to scout some new areas, and we found an area with a dried up creek bed. We got out and walked a bit and were surprised by how many frogs there were in the area. The frogs were sitting out in the dried up creek bed, many hiding from the sun in the shade of the deer hoof prints in the mud.

There were Nothern Leopard Frogs (Rana pipiens)

Here is one in a deer hoof print.

There were also Cricket Frogs (Acris crepitans)

All of the frogs were trying to catch anything that moved. On a few occasions, we saw leopard frogs jump at cricket frogs as if to eat them.

That was all we saw. Even though it was kinda a slow day, I had a lot of fun getting out with Jeff.