9-10-16

Trip Details

Location: Los Cabos area, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Weather: High of 89

Herpers: Dāv Kaufman, Jeff LeClere and Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch (except as noted)

It was a long drive back from Loreto to the Los Cabos area, but we got in just in time to start road cruising. Our hopes weren't very high with how our luck had gone thus far, but we were going to try anyway.

I was completely amazed that we had not seen a red diamond rattlesnake on this trip. They had been the second most common venomous snake we encountered last year in Baja. We weren't far into our cruise when we rolled up on a large snake. I was sure it was a red diamond rattlesnake just based on size. As soon as we got out and looked we found it to be another Baja California Rattlesnake (Crotalus enyo).

It was a bummer, obviously, since we had seen so many enyo already and hoped to see something different.

A bit later we found a juvenile Speckeled Rattlesnake (Crotalus mitchelii).

And after that, we saw another young speck. I didn't bother to shoot if for some stupid reason, probably because with finding these snakes so quickly back to back I was hoping things were really starting to move and I didn't want to spend much time messing with it when we could be finding more species. So this is a photo that Jeff took.

It ends up that I should have taken the time. It was the last snake we saw that night.

All in all it was a very weird trip. Our species count was ridiculously low. We only cruised ten live snakes in five nights of cruising. There were very few roadkilled snakes on the main roads. We only cruised three species in those ten snakes, and six of the ten were enyos. We only cruised one non-venomous snake in five nights.We didn't even see many of the most common snakes in Baja. The only thing I could blame it on is the hurricane. The temps were fairly consistent with last year, other than the two days the hurricane was there.

Anyway, it was still a fun trip overall, but I hope to have a "do over" sometime to get the taste of Baja failure out of my mouth.