Trip Details

Location: Southeastern Iowa and Benton County, Iowa

Weather: High of 70 and partly cloudy

Time: 9:30 am to 5:00 pm

Herpers:  Elizabeth Owens, Hannah Howard, Josh Spies, Dale Maxson, Don Becker and Jim Scharosch

Account by: Jim Scharosch

Photos by: Jim Scharosch

It’s the start of a new year, and my first post isn’t from my normal Benton County site! Don and I have the opportunity to do some follow up work at the Big Sand Mound Preserve this year. We learned a lot last year and enjoyed our time there immensely so we are looking forward to another season there. We are only a couple of days in and it is already discovering interesting behaviors from the mud turtles there.  Since we are doing telemetry work with them, we were able to track the mud turtles to their overwintering locations. We flagged the exact spots in the fall and then double-checked them a few weeks ago to make sure they had stayed put. As expected, they had.  This visit though, two of them had already emerged and were off swimming in a nearby flood area, far from the ponds where they were expected to spend the summer. We look forward to tracking them to see where they end up moving to throughout the year.

This is an overwintering site and in the lower right you can see an emergence hole.

Another emergence hole that we found on the hillside.

We turned up a couple of snakes as well, including this Common Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis)

We also found a Brown Snake (Storeria dekayi), which are common throughout Iowa, but not very common here.

We also found a Brown Snake (Storeria dekayi), which are common throughout Iowa, but not very common here.

That was it for our trip to BSM. We planned on heading home early, but the weather was right for Massasaugas so we headed up to a site that we had visited a number of times the previous spring. Don and I walked a bit and turned up a sauga, but it slipped off before we could get a photo. A few minutes later we heard from Dale Maxson that he had a group that was going to walk a nearby area to survey so we went to join them. As we were moving our vehicle I noticed what looked like a stick on a side road a long ways out. We had driven that road not long ago and I didn’t remember a stick there. I thought about it for a couple of seconds then told Don to back up. When I got another look I could tell the “stick” had moved partway across the road. We jetted down there and hopped out of the vehicle to see a Graham's Crayfish Snake (Regina grahamii) nearly across the road.

Crayfish snakes have a fairly limited range in Iowa so they are not often seen. It was also our first one at this site. While we were taking photos we heard Dale yell that they had a sauga already so we wrapped up and headed over there. By the time we finished our survey walk, we had turned up three saugas here, which with our initial one made for a total of four for the day. That’s a pretty good number, considering the area has a lot of grass this year and they are not easy to spot. We weren’t really focused on taking quality photos of them, so this is really the only photo I took of the Massasauga Rattlesnake (Sistrurus catenatus).

We also turned up some common garter snakes, a plains garter snake a brown snake and a fox snake at the site. That was six species in one short visit. I didn’t take any photos of them though. It was nice getting out with the crew!

During the day I had received a text from a friend who was looking for someone to remove some snakes from a basement near Mt. Auburn up in Benton county Iowa. I don’t do these things very often, nowhere near as often as Don does.  It was an old farmhouse and part of the house had a limestone foundation. Snakes find their way down there and overwinter in the rafters. They said they had seen a lot of snakes, and I imagine they have. I saw a number of sheds and there were signs of rodents. I shined my flashlight around the rafters and spotted and removed two Western Fox Snakes (Pantherophis vulpinus). One was a good sized adult, the other a smaller adult. I gave them the usual advice, that there was no way to keep them away, you have to seal up the basement to keep them out. I took the snakes to a nearby park to release them.

This is the smaller one.

This is the larger one.

I thought this was a funny photo of the larger one mid-strike. These guys weren’t too happy being removed from their nice warm basement, but in the long run they probably weren’t going to survive there long.

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It was an awesome day herping and a great start to the year!