All things herpetology

My dash is dead since I made this account just for animal stuff.

@the sweet anon

Here’s some fat Joss pics for your kind words about my snakes! :3 Posting as its own post though so you can see the pics fullsize.

Part of the zooarchaeology field school I went to back in 2012 was a camping trip around parts of California and Nevada and Oregon, at one point. It was a lot of sleeping rough and there wasn’t much in the way of amenities… which meant a lot of peeing behind cacti and sagebrush bushes. We’d camp for a night or two, do a bit of field research, tour local archaeological sites… it was pretty cool. Anyways, we’d been on the road for a very long time and it was the last leg of the trip. We were really excited because we were going to be sleeping at a shelter (we all slept outside anyways, it was really stuffy in there) and more importantly, that shelter had an outhouse. 

I put up a picture of the creek near the shelter (but not near the outhouse) because it was really pretty. Gorgeous place to camp. But there was an outhouse, the first we’d seen in a week. 

As the truck I was in pulled up past the gate, one of the girls riding in the truck was bouncing in her seat. She’d been avoiding nature’s call for quite a while because she was really, really tired of peeing behind cacti. As soon as the truck stopped, she sprang out of there and sprinted for the the outhouse.

A few seconds later, she was quietly walking out of it. She comes back over to the truck and says “there’s a rattlesnake in there.” Now, we’d seen some baby timber rattlesnakes back at the field school’s main facility, but this was no baby. This was a big, beautiful, adult Great Basin rattlesnake, and it had been pretty happy in that outhouse. But it’s not always the best idea to have rattlers around where a bunch of people and dogs will be (we had a couple dogs join us at this campsite), so the head instructor got the long-handled net and a snake hook and went into the outhouse.

The snake didn’t much seem to care- once he was removed from the outhouse, we took him a good ways away near some bushes where we thought there’d be good hiding places for him. The instructor tipped him out of the net and at first he just curled up, a bit unsure of what to make of everything.

And then he just slithered away into the bushes, hopefully to eat some mice.

Fringed Leaf Froglet, Cruziohyla craspedopus less than a minute out of the water!