A portrait of the beautiful green vine snake.

Get it Carl, get it! And although Carl tried, really tried, the snake beat him across the clearing and once in the water of the coche (oxbow) it was gone forever. The snake was a green vine snake, Oxybelis fulgidus, and Carl? Well he knows who he was.

But there is one thing that we watchers are still trying to figure out. While we were standing on the high ground talking to Carl he was fully clothed. Then 100 feet or so away the vine snake made its appearance.

Seconds later, when in hot pursuit of the snake Carl plunged into the silted water of the Amazon coche, he was wearing only his skivvies and his outer clothing was strewn along the pursuit path. How had he accomplished this seeming feat of magic?

I’m not going to show you a photo of Carl or his discarded clothing but here are a few pix of the snake species that caused the uncanny unclothing occurrence.

Juvenile Baja California rat snakes are prominently patterned.
In May of 1984, 2 miles east of Mountain Spring, Imperial County, California, a dead snake was found on Interstate 8. The snake was a Baja California rat snake, Bogertophis rosaliae. The finding of this specimen, before and since unknown to occur in the USA, then stirred much controversy. Controversy continues today with some researchers believing this locality to be genuine, but with the lack of other examples of this snake species north of the border causing other researchers to question the validity of the find.

There is, however, no question that the Baja rat snake, is a common species along almost the entire length of the peninsula for which it was named. And it is still hoped that its presence in the USA will someday be confirmed.

While hatchlings and juveniles of the Baja California rat snake are blotched dorsally, the adults of this bug-eyed snake, whether olive, lavender, or orange, are unicolored.

The genus Bogertophis is bitypic, with the only other species in the genus being the much better known Trans-Pecos rat snake, B. subocularis.

Most brilliant when a young adult, eastern mud salamanders usually dull with advancing age.
Florida was far behind. Jake (hoping for his lifer eastern mud salamander) and I were sloshing through soupy mud topped with shallow water. The water, itself, was capped with oily looking iron slicks. Long dead trees lay helter-skelter, most in advanced states of decomposition, the trunks of others more newly fallen, still hard and unyielding. Working separately, after an hour or so we had between us turned and replaced more than 100 logs and limbs, and had found nothing beneath but more mud. Disappointed, we decided to bring our hunt for the eastern mud salamander, Pseudotriton m. montanus, to a halt and move on to the next target.

We were 25 miles north of the locale when Justin called and Jake told him of our failure. In a few sentences Justin explained that we had been searching the wrong area of the vast swamp and gave Jake some more precise directions. Jake wanted to try again so we turned and returned. Forty five minutes later we were trudging past the area of the swamp we had so recently left and continued along the trail for another half mile.

More soupy mud and more logs in various stages of decomposition now lay in front of us. Having seen many eastern mud salamanders in other areas I elected to search for other caudatans along the shore. But Jake, slogging, slipping and flipping, persevered in the foot deep mud. And a half hour later his perseverance paid off. He found and we photographed his lifer eastern mud. Now it really was “next target time.”

This large, gravid, aquatic caecilian was netted from the grassy shoreline of an Amazonian river.
It was about midnight. A half dozen of us had just returned to the river boat from a long Amazonian rainforest walk. Several frogs and a few snakes had been found and we now sat on deck discussing the herps that had been seen and what had been missed, watching occasional meteors in the star-spangled sky, and sipping coffee or cold drinks. One by one the participants all headed for the showers and a well-earned few hours of sleep.

I grabbed a net and walked the gangplank to the weedy shore intending to net up a few tropical fish to photograph in the morning. Cichlids and rivulids were common and if lucky I might get a few interesting catfish as well.

But I was really lucky. After a few sweeps of the net I brought up a baby swamp eel, Synbranchus marmoratus, and…I could hardly believe my eyes, a 15” long aquatic caecilian, Typhlonectes compressicauda. I had known that the latter occurred in the region but I hadn’t until then found one. A few more net-sweeps in the shallows brought up another caecilian, this one a bit smaller. Both would be photographed and released in the morning.

Although I had actually kept and bred this interesting amphibian, the “rubber eel” of the aquarium industry, I was happy to make its acquaintance in the field. But it was late and the showers were beckoning. In just a few hours the titi monkeys would be vocalizing, signaling the start of another day of Amazon herping. Life was good.

Four-toed salamanders in their sphagnum habitat.
The bed of sphagnum stretched away from the small woodland stream in a semicircle of perhaps 20 yards. Beyond this, scattered smaller patches of sphagnum could be seen. All in all, the habitat looked ideal for the small salamander for which Jake and I were searching on this cool winter day, the four-toed salamander, Hemidactylium scutatum. But even amidst sphagnum habitats four-toes are not evenly distributed, preferring streamside locales where newly hatched larvae can attain, with just a little squirming, access to saturated moss and shallow water.

This area was intersected by several seepages as well as the main stream but it was along the latter that we finally found the 4-toes. Several females, most with egg clutches were seen. Within the egg capsules well developed, soon to hatch, larvae were wriggling.

The plethodontid genus Hemidactylium contains only this 3” long species. Usually reddish dorsally and grayish laterally, the most prominent diagnostic factors of the species are a white belly that bears well-separated black dots and a noticeable basal constriction on the tail. The tail autotomizes readily at the constriction.

This salamander occurs in a great many disjunct populations that range southwestward from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia to extreme seOK and eLA.

Two of the several American crocodiles near the Everglades Marina.
I was standing at the edge of the marina near the docks at the general store in Flamingo. It was a quarter moon, partially cloudy, night in Everglades National Park. A slight breeze stirred a few tiny wavelets to life. Their sloshing against the pilings nullified many of the surrounding sounds. But the splash of a surfacing fish could occasionally be heard and a barred owl repeatedly asked a mournful “who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all” from a tree closer to the road. On the docks laughing gulls and black skimmers stood mewing and murmuring , the gulls ghostly pale, the skimmers inky dark. Some ripples below me caught my eye and I turned the headlight on. A fair sized American crocodile had surfaced! My night was complete.

On almost every Everglades trip, day or night, I take a few minutes and stop by the marina to try and search out a basking crocodile. Occasionally one or more will be on the near bank or near the fish-cleaning house, but more often a croc can be found on the far bank. With diligent searching it is almost always possible to see 1 or more American crocodiles, Crocodylus acutus. Most are between 6 and 10 feet in length, but occasionally—I guess it would be more accurate to say “rarely--” a hatchling or yearling may be seen.

From a Florida population in the low hundreds a few decades ago, the number of this very cold sensitive, endangered, croc now probably exceeds 2,000. Known nests are carefully monitored by both federal and state biologists. It has been recorded in coastline habitats from Tampa Bay on the Gulf coast, southward through the Keys, then northward to Jupiter Beach on the east coast. As expected, and as always in the USA, it is most common in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.