Backdate: 06/05/2005
I know this is a little out of order with some of my other backdated posts. Please forgive me.
My son, Winfield, and I headed to Wisconisn on the evening of June 2nd. The basic plan was to spend Friday and Saturday finding as many herps as possible. I had mapped out some spots near my hometown in southeast WI as well as some near the Wisconsin river, and a farm in Columbia County owned by a friend and former business associate.
We started the day in my hometown at a site where I have been finding Plains Garter Snakes/Thamnophis radix for the past 25 years. This place has been developed signifigantly since 1980 when I found the first one. Several appartment buildings, some warehouses and even a new highschool have greatly reduced and fragmented livable habitat. In 2003, last time I was there, I found a small pocket of field remnant near the stream that flows through these parcels. It was littered with pallets, cardboard and other debris, and harbored several yearling radix along with a female several years old.
This year, when we returned, part of the little area where we had found the snakes above had been bulldozed, creating a big pile of brush and effectively reducing much of the formerly scattered cover. There were a few boards left. We found only one snake. It was a radix that looked only old enough to have been born late the previous summer. Took several pics but none turned out very clear. This snake may have just shed, because the blotching between and below the stripes was very distinct, the dorsal stripe was bright orange, especially near the head, and there was a light cream collar on either side of the neck– a feature I do not remember seeing before on this species.
After this we headed west towards the river. We stopped at a marsh wildlife preserve about which we traipsed for a couple of hours, but found no herps. From there we continued west until arriving at one of the Lower Wisconsin River State Wildlife Areas. This is where the habitat picture at the top of the page was taken. The terrain appeared, to me anyway, to be perfect for Bullsnakes, Hognosed Snakes, Fox Snakes, and maybe, if we were lucky, racers, a skink, box turtles.
The first and only herp we found at after a signifigant amount of searching was the Wood Frog pictured below. I am pretty sure I have seen wood frogs before, but this is the first one I have made a positive ID on. I am pretty proud of having caught a photo of a Wood Frog on a hunk of wood.
After giving up on this spot, I consulted the map and saw that the state owned a couple of parcels up around the river bend, so we headed there. We stopped at kind of a barrens/savannah type preserve, where there were, believe it or not, wild cactuses (cacti?) growing.
This spot was really beautiful; although the soil had been sandy at the LWRSWA, this place reminded both Win and I of a desert. Good spot for hognosed snakes, we agreed. In fact we later came upon a naturalist who had minutes before seen a hognosed at this site. He told us where, but of course we found nothing. We did find several pieces of tin, which I am sure were put there by wildlife managers to moniter herp populations, but we found only a mouse under one of them, nothing under the rest.
We were making our way around kind of a thicket, when Winfield exclaimed that I had stepped on a turtle.
It turned out to be an Ornate Box Turtle– really nice looking. I have other pics of this animal that will show up in a later post. We felt very fortunate, as Ornate Box Turtles are endangered in WI. We decided to put it down and watch it until it came out of its shell. After about 2 minutes with no result, we decided to look elswhere for 3-5 more minutes, and then sneak back to see if he had poked his head out. When we returned, however, not only had he stuck his head out, but had gone so far that we could not locate him again. We felt like complete hares!
We stopped at Black Earth Creek on the way back to Joel’s house, partly to see if we could find any of the Northern Water Snakes that are (were?) so plentiful there, and partly for old time’s sake. No snakes, but plenty of rising trout.
The next day we had planned to arrive at my friends farm at about 8 a.m. to find fox snakes. He had told me that the area was crawling with them, and that he had gotten permission for us to visit some of his neihhbors land as well.
We got there late. There was no sign of “Farmer Mark”. So we looked on his land anyway. We did find a dead Eastern Garter Snake, but nothing else. After a while we gave up and went fishing, but later returned to find my farmer friend at home.
He directed us to several “prime spots”, one of which was a road along a hillside that was bordered by woods and farm lots. It was along this road that I saw my first Fox Snake/Elaphe v. vulpina in the wild.
Actually, Joel saw him (a 2.5 ft male) first. And Joel actually did the catching. But since I led the expedition and gained permission to access the land, I take full credit.
I know everyone is wondering, just what is the differrence between the Western Fox Snake and the Eastern (Elaphe vulpina gloydii or Elaphe gloydii, depending). Breifly, the differences are as follows. The Eastern Fox snake occurs only in MI, OH, and Ontario, Canada around the shores of lakes Erie and Huron. They have fewer and larger blotches, and their heads tend to be a more coppery red than the westerns, whose heads tend toward the tan. The Eastern Fox Snake is a habitat and prey specialist, living primarily in marshland and eating the resident voles. The Western Fox Snake lives in much more varied habitat and eats much more varied prey and, consequently, has not been as sharply affected by habitat reduction.
While some herp fans favor the coloration of the Easterns; I think this pic of the Western we caught that day (and, for the record, later released) makes a strong case for the rival beauty of the Fox Snakes found in central WI. The blotches are so clean, the background color such a nice buff, and the head even looks kind of “coppery”.