The Midwest in mid april

Went on high-speed burn through the midwest in mid-april 2011, covering 2000 miles of beautiful country in four days.

Our first day we drove out of Chicago with the destination of south east Missouri. Our theory was to high-tail it into St. Louis and then herp the way south. It worked fine, and we started coming up with the various usual stuff; ground skinks, five-lined skinks, a couple of ugly box turtles and frogs of various kinds. I think our first snake was a very ugly l. t. syspila just south of St. Louis. Didn't bother to photograph, didn't have any light anyway. The next morning we worked our way farther into the southeast of MO and found a few good snakes under some great roadside AC. Since I've stopped with the "photograph everything" and have started just taking the photos I want to take, it's a mixed bag of what and when we found. One stop had a black rat, an ugly calligaster and an ugly holbrooki.

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Starting to head west, we flipped a great tin pile that had two racers, two syspila and three holbrooki

little one
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bigger one, maybe two years old

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baby holbrooki

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We spent half a day hiking around an area in MO that is very much like snake road in southern Illinois, except it doesn't get nearly the herping traffic. The snake migration had obviously finished, but we scrounged up a couple things on the crawl.

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That night we drove west into Joplin and spent the night. The next morning it was into Kansas. It was very windy, but we quickly got life-list red-sided gartersnakes. They were too ugly to make it into the photo archives. We found five or six over the time spent in Kansas and Oklahoma.

In Kansas we drove through a cool strip mine area and found some stuff on the road.

My friend Dave with a Diamondback watersnake

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big, ugly black ratsnake

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we also flipped an ugly calligaster.

After Kansas we drove south into Oklahoma, and stayed to the northeast. We were hoping to find some hots because we sick of finding nothing but milksnakes, kingsnakes and ratsnakes :D :D :D

An old barn yielded a pair of nice looking calligaster

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another one this nice looking ribbon snake

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and on our way out of OK we stopped at a rocky creek and flipped a couple snakes in the flat rocks.

midland watersnake

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After OK we drove into AR and flipped three or four kingsnakes and a pair of monstrous ratsnakes. Sorry no pictures, light was failing and we were definitely working quickly to stop at as many spots as possible. We stopped to spend the night in Springfield MO.

Next morning we drove towards St. Louis again, flipping stuff on the way.

BIG skink

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finally a hot snake. And a pretty one at that. Osage Copperhead.

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Then we flipped a pretty little syspila and probably a few things I've forgotten. It seemed like a kingsnake or ratsnake was under every piece of cover. Finally we got to the St. Louis area and hit the spots that we originally came for; the MO glades. Which were sadly destroyed by rock-flippers. Maybe herpers, or invert people, or collectors. Can't say for sure, but we didn't find anything but poorly replaced rocks on the main glade faces. Good thing there are some areas that aren't easily accessible, or we wouldn't have found these lifers..

Lined snake. Think we found three or four.
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And the trip's only snake that we pulled the field guide for, great plains ratsnake. there was some debate over whether or not it was another calligaster. I won the argument. :thumb:

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After that it was a straight shot back home, with plans to do something similar next spring.

Herp city!

Nice copperhead. Heck, they're all nice.

2000 miles? Man, y'all are some dedicated herpers.

Very fine!

Wow, awesome stuff, thanks for posting. Do you mean to say you have found all of these snakes within 4 days, in the midwest?! You must really know what you are doing, and where to look. I would consider myself lucky to find more than one in a single day, if even that lol. That is funny that your friend is putting the camera in that snakes face, I thought those watersnakes had nasty tempers lol. No bites then?

:thumbsup:

2000 miles in four days is not uncommon - although I admit I prefer to hike around a bit, my friend dave is not much for finding snakes "on the crawl" and prefers to herp blowdowns and other artificial cover (AC). Since most of the search pattern involves cruising back roads looking for downed barns and houses, you cover a lot of miles in no time at all. I figure we found somewhere around 70 or 80 snakes on this trip, which was pretty good considering most of them were "high quality" finds like kingsnakes, milksnakes and ratsnakes. In some areas it's real easy to get 60 or 70 cottonmouths in a day, or hundreds of prarie ringnecks in the missouri wilderness, but there's something more satisfying about seeing diversity rather than sheer numbers. Oh yeah, and the watersnakes ALL have nasty tempers. I'm sure this one bit us more than a few times, most do.

These are some awesome images! I love that copperhead. omg what a beautiful one that is!

I always enjoy your threads for the information within them and the quality images. You do not disappoint!