6-8-16

Trip Details

Location: Linn County, IA

Weather: 80 degrees, sunny

Time: 4:00 pm

Herpers: Don Becker, Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch

Don had seen the same hognose snake basking two days in a row so I thought this might be my opportunity to "cheat" and see a hognose this spring. Spoiler alert, it didn't work.

We hiked the prairies in the area and checked the cover items with no luck at all. As we were headed back we walked the prairie near our vehicles and spotted a Bullsnake (Pituophis catenifer) on the crawl.

It was about three feet long. It didn't go into the typical bullsnake hissing strike mode at all, it just tried to crawl away. I grabbed a few photos and we let it crawl off.

We made another loop through the prairie and found another bullsnake. This one was slightly shorter than the first and went straight to the full on hissing and striking defensive mode.

We moved on to another site where Don has some tin layed out. There were A LOT of Eastern Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis), we probably saw more than twenty. I didn't mess with catching and posing them, I just grabbed a few in-situ shots as they sat or crawled away. There was a nice variety of dark snakes with very little coloration to lighter colored snakes with bright yellow and red.

The last piece of cover we turned held a young adult Fox Snake (Pantherophis vulpinus).

No hognose today, but I'm not going to complain at all about finding a couple of bullsnakes and a fox snake!