Below our windows, this Florida leopard frog was on the prowl for insect drawn by the lights.
Darkness. Thunder. Lightning. Ferocious rain. Nervous dogs. Moths drawn to the window screen by the lights. I sat here watching 2 pretty, fair-sized moths, wondering whether they would leave in the rain. A kerthunk! and before my eyes one moth disappeared. It didn't walk away. It didn't fly. It was just gone, Another kerthunk and the 2nd moth disappeared, What the...? So I walked out, got soaked, and initially saw nothing. 2 screens down another moth landed. A patch of dirt exploded and the moth disappeared. Beneath the window sat a well camouflaged Florida leopard frog, Rana sphenocephala utricularia. If the rain weren't in my eyes I'll bet I would see the anuran smacking its lips. I wonder if my soaked camera will ever work again?

Besides these 2, we saw several other Carolina "sandhill phase" pygmy rattler on this trip.

Initially our photo-target was the carpenter frog, Rana virgatipes. We had both seen this little ranid on many occasions but it just seemed time to upgrade photos.

But as Jake and I often do, by only an hour later as we had crossed into Georgia, our photo-target list had grown to encompass three additional taxa, Carolina pygmy rattlers Sistrurus m. miliarius, of the Sand Hills phase, just for the heck of it, a southern copperhead, Agkistrodon c. contortrix, and a small, still undescribed two-lined salamander lookalike, Eurycea species. As it turned out, we were successful on all but the salamander.

For a few years the Marie Gallante sail-tailed anole could be seen in southwestern Florida. It was apparently extirpated by the occasional freezes.
This is a pretty, large (males to about 9 inches females significantly smaller), bluish headed anole with a yellow-green body color. Males have a prominent tailfin. This anole, Anolis ferreus by name, is endemic to the island of Marie Galante in the Lesser Antilles. In the 1990s several examples (adults of both sexes and hatchlings) were seen and photographed in Lee County, FL, but the small population seems no longer extant.

Disturbed during an evening crawl, this canefield king coiled and hissed rather than hurrying away.
Florida’s not like it used to be. But that’s no secret. Native Floridians and long-term residents have known this for decades. And since I’m one of the latter and I have an interest in natural history I’ve noticed and disliked the trend, the never ending conversion of natural areas to macadam covered parking lots and shopping centers. When I started coming to Florida in the mid-1950s US 27 was a 2-lane road that was clad down to Lake Okeechobee with woodlands and a few pastures and south of the Lake was edged on the east by an Australian pine rimmed canal and Everglades and on the west by Everglades, Everglades, and more Everglades. Somewhere to the west of Okeelanta was an area termed “the peanut patch” in which were a dozen long unused migrant laborers houses, all of which were then home to what seemed an endless number of beautiful deep orange Everglades rat snakes.