Woohoo! What started as a pretty boring night turned out to be a rather successful one. I went out field herping at nearly 4 am this morning, still dark out. I saw some raccoon tracks, heard some animal rustling in the bushes (probably a deer), and heard the green frogs singing, but didn't see much.
Then I went to look for the giant wolf spider I had seen 2 weeks ago. Although she was nowhere to be found, in her place I found the complete shed skin of what I think was a rat snake. I had to wrestle the skin out from the mangled insides of a dying tree. Its 4 feet 11 inches long!
I'm a big fan of salamanders, but back home in ND we have only one species there, the tiger salamander (
Ambystoma tigrinum). To add to that, the only other salamander species I've ever seen in person was yet another ambystomid, the spotted salamander (
Ambystoma maculatum), which basically looks like a tiger salamander, only its smaller, purple, and has yellow spots and black eyes. The body shape is the same.
Tonight made one of my most memorable catches ever. I caught my first non-tiger salamander salamander! He's a small dude, only about 3.5 inches long, but he's cool! I was near the edge of the stream, when something jumped in the water. When searching for it with my flashlight, I caught a second sally in the beam, and then caught him with my hands. Yeah, these guys leap! I've never seen a salamander that leaps before. Anyway, I'm not familiar with the local species, but I think he may be a
Desmognathus ochrophaeus (mountain dusky salamander), or possibly a light colored
Plethodon cinereus (redback salamander). ANYWAY, here's the best pics I could take with my webcam. I named the sally HS, cause all I could say when I first grabbed him was "Holy S***, Holy S***, , Holy S***, ...."
To show the whole skin compared to something, here it is with my hoodie. My white sock is where the tail ends.
snakeskin head
pics of HS
