6-29-16

Trip Details

Location: Buchanan county, Iowa

Weather: 75 degrees and mostly cloudy

Time: 5:30 p.m.

Herpers: Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch

This will be a short write up. I went to a spot where I usually end up only finding garter and brown snakes. Once in a while I find smooth green snakes so I keep coming back. In four years at this site I have never found anything other than those three species, even though there is enough habitat to have something larger crawling around there.

I saw seven Eastern Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis)

Five of them were large gravid females like the one pictured above, the rest were smaller males. This wasn't the prettiest of the bunch, just the one I decided to grab a quick photo of.

I saw three gravid female Brown Snakes (Storeria deyayi), all about twelve inches long.

This was the first

The second brown snake.

Like most days visiting this site, that was all I saw. Nothng exciting, nothing out of the ordinary, just another day herping. Most days herping are like that, and other than very early in the season, I usually don't take the time to document those "normal boring days". Today I decided to take a minute to appreciate the "boring little snakes" I usually take for granted.