The color of the tiny, endangered Harlequin Mantella, Mantella cowani, makes it a perfect candidate for the alternative name of "Halloween Mantella."



Once sporadically imported for the American (and other) pet trade, it has been several years since it was last available. This frog occurs in high altitude forests and seasonally in wet grasslands in eastern central Madagascar.

As is often the case with localized herp species from areas that are difficult to access, very little is know with certainty about the biology and life history of the inch-long Harlequin Mantella. It is apparently diurnal. The clicking vocalizations of this frog have been heard from shallow stream edges and damp rock crevices. The fewer than 50 eggs are laid in protected damp leaf litter and mosses but the life of the tadpoles remains unknown.

Although no longer legally collected for the pet trade, continuing deforestation and other habitat modifications seemingly remain very real threats to the long-term existence of this remarkably beautiful, Liliputian anuran.

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I grew up only a few houses away from a fair-sized lake in Massachusetts where I spent a lot of time as a kid watching musk and painted turtles in the shallows and American and Fowler’s toads when they gathered on the sandy shores in the spring to trill or scream, and listening to the plunking notes of green frogs and the jug-o-rums of Bullfrogs, Rana catesbeiana.



Jug-o-rum? I listened to the squeaky fright notes of first-year bullfrogs along the lakeshore and to the deep bass of the old territory-holders out in the lily-pad patches, but I’m not sure I ever heard one of those bullfrogs say jug-o-rum.

I read Conant. I read Behler and King. They both mentioned the jug-o-rum calls. So I began listening to bullfrogs in earnest. I listened to the bullfrogs on Longmeadow Flats. Heard a lot of deep notes, but jug-o-rum? Nope. Ditto for the ones in northern New Jersey, for all in southeastern South Carolina, and for others in north Florida.
"Brrrrrrrrrrummmmmm," or maybe "urrrrrrrrr-ummmmmmm," but no matter where the chorus was heard -- Maine, Texas, or Baja California -- I heard nary a jug-o-rum amongst them. Not a one!

So one hot summer night, seeking validation for my inability to hear what seemed to be the traditional call, I talked Jake Scott into a bullfrog search and listen foray in north central Florida. We found a spot that was literally resounding with bullfrog vocalizations. I listened and, happily, didn’t hear a single jug-o-rum. Ok, Jake, I asked, what do the bullfrogs say? His answer was immediate: "Jug-o-RUMMMMMMM."

I give up. Jug-o-rummmmmm it is.

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Under ordinary conditions I like birds of prey. But the red-shouldered hawks in this neighborhood have about outstayed their welcome, at least from me. The hawks moved in, built a nest in a big pine a few houses away, and set up serious housekeeping. First it seemed to be the introduced Cuban Brown Anoles that were the preferred prey. Although I enjoy watching the anoles they really don’t belong here and there seems no way the hawks could get them all anyway.

A few years ago, Patti and I decided that the Southern Toads needed a helping hand to make it through what seemed to be a never ending drought. We put a little 10 x 12 foot pond up on the hill and toad song again filled the neighborhood. And Southern Leopard Frogs moved in. The toads were pretty nocturnal but the leopard frogs were active both day and night. The hawks soon found these. New prey.

But then the Eastern Garter Snakes and Southern Black Racers also found the frogs in our puddle. The snakes moved in and their populations persisted for about three years. It was nice to see a big racer periscoping for frogs.

Our screened back deck is a wonderful addition to the house. Rather than a deck we refer to it as our aviary, for it is home to a half a dozen European goldfinches that entertain us non-stop. But we could just as well call it our "lizardarium," for despite deterring the omnipresent mosquitoes many local lizards wander in and out along pathways known only to them.

Broad-headed skinks appear now and again, but most of the lizards are one of two kinds of anoles, the native green or the introduced Cuban brown. The green anoles are the most active and the most arboreal, and as I watch their antics my thoughts often drift back to the first green anoles I ever saw.



It was in the 1940s, I was 7 or 8 years old, and the anoles, a slender golden chain affixed around their neck (no photos), were being offered for sale as living lapel decorations at the New York Sportsman’s Show.

They were being sold as American chameleons, and with them came a care sheet that explained that all the purchaser needed to do to assure the lizard a long life was to provide it with sugar water.

I had never seen such wonderful creature and sugar water would be easy enough to provide, so I wheedled my parents into buying me one lizard. Through trial and error I learned that the little lizard needed a much more varied diet than sugar water and that when he was turned loose on my mother’s houseplants he avidly hunted houseflies and other insect repast.

Could this little lizard have been the cause of my lifelong infatuation with herps? Well, it and the long ago herp supply company, Quivira Specialties, certainly were contributors to my lingering interest.

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The car was far ahead of us when it swerved sharply. What, we wondered, was the reason for that?

Jake and I were road cruising and not in any real hurry. The car ahead had disappeared from sight around a curve, and we were now near their position when they had swerved.

Suddenly Jake yelled, "Canebrake!" And sure enough, lying almost dead center in the road was a 4-and-a-half foot long canebrake rattler, Crotalus horridus "atricaudatus."



As I slowed to a stop, Jake grabbed a hook and piled out. As he neared the snake, now alerted, another car approached from around the curve. Jake touched the snake on the tail and fortunately, the snake proved to be a runner. It wanted no familiarity with anything and darted across the road, but then stopped on the grassy verge and looked like it was heading back. We stopped it.

The other car, filled with young women, stopped near us. They asked in unison, "What is it?"

"Rattler," Jake replied.

"What are you doing with it?" one of them asked.

"Keeping it off of the road." I replied.

"Let it go," one of the young women said. "We came back to kill it."

"Looks like you’re out of luck," I told them.

"You’re not killing this one," Jeff said. A couple of more unintelligible comments, and they left.

Gives me a warm, fuzzy, feeling to know that Jake and I were able to save this big male from the road idiots.

The locale was rather open, and once the canebrake was in the canebrake, having slowed to cross the roadside ditch, we guided him to the foot of a big pine.

Once against it, he coiled quietly, a monarch of the southern brakes.

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The last time Patti and I visited the Daytona Captive Breeders Expo was four years ago. I had looked at about all of the ball pythons and leopard geckos I chose to see on that day, and we were taking the long way around to the exit.

As I was passing almost the last sales booth in that aisle, I glanced to the left and stopped in my tracks. In one of the half dozen tanks on the table was a beautiful lizard that I recognized immediately as a Diploglossus lessonae. I sidled over to the table, and as I got there my interest in the lizards was sidetracked by a tank of frogs.

They were a Pacman-type frog but of a species I had not before seen. The vendor asserted that they were Brazilian horned frogs, Ceratophrys aurita. Based on that, I purchased the only one of the three that looked in good condition. This was a male and even he had what appeared to be a corneal lipid deposit on one eye. We named him Grumpy. Philippe deVosjoli bought the other two, and I believe that they are still alive. Philippe determined that the species was not aurita as initially thought, but was another Brazilian taxon, Ceratophrys joazeirensis, a mid-sized species.

Whatever this little frog may be, he has now stared at me morosely for the better part of four years. His periods of quietude are interspersed with an occasional night of vocalizing as thunderstorms or tropical depressions roll through. And he has never once refused his nightcrawlers. Not once.

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Stopped by the little turtle pool, as I do each morning, and found a hatchling turtle floating in a patch of sunshine. I took a hurried look around on the surrounding land and found a a hole about an inch in diameter and 3 inches deep.

Inside were four eggshells. There was no question about the identification, The only species housed there had been Rhinoclemmys pulcherrima incisa, the Guatemalan (painted) wood turtle. The adults were now in a large pen for the summer rainy season.

This turtle, if you’re not familiar with it has a brown, rough surfaced, carapace that may be quite flat, rather highly domed, or somewhere between these extremes. The carapace is a warm brown (color is sometimes hard to determine because these turtles are adept and persistent at kicking dirt upon themselves) and the yellow plastron bears a large, dark central blotch that is often weakly edged with pale rose.

But it is the facial neck and forelimb patterns that give rise to the common name of painted. The brown to grayish face and anterior neck bears a complex of thin, but easily visible, bright red stripes. The red striping is also present on the anterior surface of the forelimbs but there the striping is broader and even more pronounced. All in all, these are pretty turtles and at least as importantly, they are hardy and easily cared for.

It seemed apparent that there were no more hatchlings in the pond, so I began a methodical search of the surrounding area. Looking amidst and around the grasses disclosed one additional hatchling. The next day, following a hard rain, I found the third, and on the third day I found the fourth baby. I had now found a hatchling for each of the empty eggshells.

The hatchlings (all brought indoors) are quite like miniatures of the adults in appearance, but have less strongly textured carapaces and rosier plastrons.



I wonder if a second nesting occurred this summer. Another month and I should know.

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The little creek puddled out a bit as it neared the road and then was constricted narrowly into a metal culvert that passed beneath the road. Upstream a bit, the creek narrowed and gurgled merrily downhill around and over some boulders. Still further upstream, the boulders were larger and the creek was even more precipitous. Beyond that I couldn’t see from my current vantage point, but I’d soon know the scope of things.

To either side of the creekbed grassy meadows interspersed with small escarpments and many boulders sloped far upward, and at their summits were stands of pines. We started at the bottom and began working our way upward. Tough walking. So we moved to the grassy slopes and slipped and tripped our way to the top (hoping all the while for no encounter with a hidden timber rattler), reaccessed the stream, and began our walk downward. This was a little easier.

We were at this creek in the hopes of finding a seal salamander, Desmognathus montanus, exhibiting piebaldism. Kenny had been told by a researcher that there was a high incidence of this aberrancy at this locale. In fact, his initial information was that all of the seal salamanders in this creek were piebald.



We walked slowly along the creek bed, turning and replacing an occasional likely-looking, water-swept rock along the way. Going was slow, but with the first few salamanders found we determined that definitely not all of the salamanders were piebald. In fact, as the day wore on and one after the other the salamanders proved normal, we began to wonder whether we’d actually find one that was piebald.

We did. In fact we found three, one adult and two juveniles. We extend a big thank you to Kenny’s sources!

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The little car bumped and thumped as we raced along a nearly dark forest road in North Carolina. Our destination was one of those many that appeared only a mile or so away on the map, but when you factored in the twists, turns, ups, and downs, bumps and thumps, it proved to be a good 30 minutes from our starting point.

Salamander was the name, and finding them was the game. The little salamanders that we sought were the red-legged and the red-cheeked variants of the Ocoee salamander, Desmognathus ocoee. These are harmless mimics, if you will, of the distasteful Jordan’s salamander complex phases.

We finally sped into a parking area overlooking a deserted campground. And in the middle of the campground was a ring of sizable rocks and a dozen or more well charred log sections all topsy turvy atop a bed of ashes. I spent some time flipping logs and rocks in the surrounding woodlands. Kenny headed straight for the campsite. By the time I got to that area he had already found Red-legged Salamanders, Plethodon shermani, Blue Ridge Two-lined Salamanders, Eurycea wilderae, and several of the desired color variants of the Ocoee Salamander, Desmognathus ocoee.

But for us the best was yet to come. Beneath one log we found an Ocoee Salamander that rather than either/or was gaudily clad in red not only on the cheeks but on the legs as well. This was a variant that neither of us had been aware of.



Success, and now the long drive back to hustle and bustle of the peopled world.

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If you take the time to look back into the nomenclatural history of the northern leopard frog, Rana pipiens, you will note at least two names that were long ago hidden in synonomy.

Both were of northern populations, Minnesota and Wisconsin to be specific and I found both to be just different enough from a typical northern leopard frog to be of interest.



One variant, Rana pipiens burnsi by name, was nearly devoid of the oval leopard spots that typify the species.