4-22-18

Trip Details

Location: Southeastern Iowa

Weather: 68 degrees, breezy

Time: 1:30 p.m. 

Herpers: Ryan Rasmussen, Laura and Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch except where noted

This is going to be a Massasauga spring. I took Laura down to the site where Don and I had found the sauga a couple of days ago. You may be thinking that we are hitting this site too often, but we have actually been asked to survey the property for herps so we have good reason to keep checking it. It paid off again in a big way. Also, just to get this out of the way, I forgot my camera and had to take cell phone photos again so forgive the photo quality.

Laura and I started walking along a small waterway and she walked up on an adult Blandings Turtle (Emydoidea blandingii).

We don't see them all that often up close so it was a cool find.

We also found a number of Common Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) under cover and on the crawl throughout the day. Here are a couple of pics found at various points of the day.

We didn't see anything else and only had a small area left to walk when I noticed another vehicle was parked near ours, and then spotted another person out walking. I was pretty sure I knew who it was, and when we walked over to talk to him I was right, it was Ryan Rasmussen who was also part of the group who is surveying the area. Ryan mentioned he had seen a juvenile blandings turtle earlier, and also that he had just seen a sauga. We walked back to where he had found his and lucky for us it was still sitting right where he had left it. It is still early enough in the spring that the Massasauga Rattlesnakes (Sistrurus catenatus) are not straying far from the crayfish burrows in which they hibernate.

We didn't disturb it, took a few photos and moved on. It wasn't long before Laura spotted a snake head barely poking out of a crayfish burrow. It was a last year's baby sauga.

Photo by Ryan Rasmussen

Luckily Ryan was able to grab a photo before it withdrew into the safety of it's home. It was a good spot on Laura's part, it wasn't an easy one to see!

We walked along a waterway back towards the vehicles and Ryan spotted an adult sauga basking atop a crayfish burrow.

This one only had one eye, most likely having lost the other in a long ago accident or predation attempt.

Not long after Laura spotted another adult soaking up the afternoon warmth.

 

We finished our walk back to the vehicles, seeing a few more garter snakes along the way. When we got there, Laura spotted a nice subadult Fox Snake (Pantherophis vulpinus) laying directly behing our car.

It's a good thing she saw it or we would have run it over backing out. The snake didn't even move as I reached down to pick it up and move it.

It was another awesome day at the site, to say the least. It was nice meeting up with Ryan too!