8-31-18

Trip Details

Location: Linn and Jackson Counties, Iowa

Weather: 68 and fair in the morning, 75 and fair in the afternoon

Time: 11:00 am in Linn County, 1:00 pm in Jackson County

Herpers: Laura and Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch

It was another one of those days were Laura piped up and said she wanted to go herping. We ventured out to our Linn County hognose and bullsnake sand prairie to see if we could turn up any hatchlings. It ended up being a slow day there.

We did find a Milk Snake (Lampropeltis triangulum) very much in shed.

And this Common Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis)

It is nice to see someone else has done some habitat work. This was a small grove of scrubby trees that were cut down on the prairie.

We were kinda disappointed, but I proposed a spur of the moment jaunt to Jackson County to see if the timbers we had seen a few weeks ago had dropped their babies. Laura was in so we took off.

We walked in the miserable hike through neck high grass and weeds, and went to check the rookeries we had seen on our previous trip. The first one we walked up on paid off.

We counted about six babies at this rock. I obviously didn't turn the rock and disturb them so there could have been more. This was the rock that had held the gray timber on the previous trip so it was awesome to see those genes were going to be reproduced again in this population.

The big center glade on this hill, the one where we had seen the three snakes last time, didn't have any babies. That was a bit unexpected, but it is hard to say what might have happened.

We did find an adult timber hiding out under the edge of a rock though.

Soon after that we found another one on the crawl.

 

In the video you can see a number of the stumps of the small trees we cut the previous fall.

We walked toward the eastern end of the hillside and found a rookery that we had missed on our previous trip. It still held the female and her newly born babies!

I only saw three or four babies, but I'm sure more were up under the rock.

I have no idea what this fungus is but it was kinda cool looking so I took a photo.

With our additional trip northeast we turned a lame herping day into an awesome herping day. We also accomplished something in proving there was some recruitment this season at the timber location. Good stuff!!