Reptile Fight Club - Grilling the Expert w Bob Zappalorti

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

In this episode, Justin and Rob are grilling Bob Zappalorti.Who will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIGFollow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

all right welcome to reptile fight club uh tonight we've got another wonderful guest lined up and we're excited to talk to him. So this is another segment of Grilling the Expert. And we're very pleased to have Bob Zappalorti with us tonight to talk about some of his amazing history in herpetology and some great stories, I'm sure. So we're very, very pleased to have him on. Thanks for coming on, Bob. And I'm excited to have you here. Well, thanks for inviting me, and it's a pleasure to be here and meet both Rob and Justin. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, what a pioneer, and just you've got an amazing career in herpetology, and yeah, we're just beyond excited to talk with you tonight. Well, I've been a professional herpetologist since 1964 when I started at the Staten Island Zoo.

I was hired by the late Carl Kohfeldt, and he was my mentor and my friend. Not much better mentor than that. And especially if you can call him a friend. Yeah, I think his books have meant a lot to Rob and myself. And we've been very excited to have that link with somebody that knew Carl Caulfield. What an amazing thing. So I guess maybe what are some of your fondest memories or things that you were involved with with Dr. Caulfield? Well, I got the opportunity to go out in the field with him on several occasions, hunting for pine snakes and corn snakes different uh snake species that are found there

yeah being being in the field with kaufeld was a real education because he knew so much about both the natural history and the plants and the birds and all the wildlife that occurred in the area so you know he's he loved he loved to tell stories and to teach uh his his friends and and uh co-workers so that was very exciting. Oh, nice. Yeah. He's been an inspiration for a few of our Herp trips. Maybe Rob can expound on that a little more, I'm sure. But yeah, we went to some places kind of walking in his footsteps and looking for some of the same spots that he went to and describes in his book. And so it's really neat to kind of compare notes, I guess. I'm sure things were a little different when he was walking those areas in your early career, but I'm sure things have changed a bit.

So I don't know. Yeah. Sorry, Bob, go ahead. Ocotee got closed because it became so popular that actually there would be 100 people down there snake hunting. And then that number grew. So a lot of the landowners became angry because people were slobs and they would leave their trash and do things that the landowners didn't like. And then they finally just closed it off to all the snake hunters. you know, leave their trash and do things that the landowners didn't like. And then they finally just closed it off to all the snake hunters.

So many animals were over-collected, especially the Okotee corns that I'm sure you're familiar with. Yeah, very popular, right, in herpetoculture. It's unfortunate when, you know, I think that probably happens in herpetoculture that's it's unfortunate when you know i i think that probably happens a lot more than we'd like it to where people are using science to kind of make a buck and that's really a frustrating thing i i would encourage people to not do that you know right to uh and and we benefit from this science, you know, to learn about the I mean, I'm a big fan of natural history and just learning about what the animals are doing in the wild and, you know, to take them out of that wild environment and just keep something in my memory. The average home range of a corn snake is between 80 and 100 acres. Wow. The average home range of a pine snake, a northern pine snake,

is 150 to 300 acres. Right. So people take them and they keep them in this little cage. And when the animals in the wild, they have the freedom to roam around and forage and do whatever they need to do to reproduce. And then people keep them in these small cages and in plastic boxes and sawdust. And it's just, you know, it's unfair to the snake. Yeah. It's always nice when people have larger cages with natural settings. You know, it just makes the snake a little more at home rather than living in a plastic box.

Right. Yeah, I think we're moving. In general, I think herpetoculture is moving away from the small plastic racks, you know, the boxes and the racks and things and moving more towards naturalistic vivaria. It seems like there's kind of a movement in that direction. But, you know, it's difficult to erase the last 15, 20 years and change, you know, from keeping in little tiny shoe boxes to to large naturalistic enclosures i know i was kind of sold on that idea you know early in my keeping career and and unfortunately you know some of that still persists but um trying to change and make it better for the animals i think that's always a good thing as long as you're trying to make it better for the animals that's

yeah and it's a lot more enjoyable as a keeper right to make it better for the animals, that's key. Yeah. And it's a lot more enjoyable as a keeper, right, to be able to see the animals engaging in more naturalistic behaviors, right? For sure, yeah. I think that's frustrating, too, for folks that have seen them in the field and kind of observed them in their natural habitat and kind of seen what they can do in their environment. I had a recent experience with a Kimberly rock monitor where just watching it crawling on the rocks. And I thought, I just can't bring myself to put it in a cage unless it's a really huge, really big naturalistic setup. I think I'd feel a little bad about that. Yeah. A lot of the zoos have come around to making really beautiful exhibits, natural-looking exhibits.

We've come a long way. Some of those products, actually, there are people that are doing it themselves, these great artistic talents who are putting what essentially look like zoo backgrounds into enclosures. And there are actually companies that are manufacturing those products now as well. So I know that I've seen some ads in Reptile Magazine, nice enclosures people can buy now that weren't available years ago.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I do have a bit of an outline here you know no worries and we can kind of work through it to hopefully you know gain access to all these great stories and insights that you have um so we kind of brushed over it a bit how did you come to be at the staten island zoo well uh as a young boy uh reptiles and amphibians was my hobby. It started probably, I don't know, when I was nine or ten years old. I grew up in Staten Island, New York.

My father bought his book, Snakes and Snake Hunting, Caulfield's book. After reading the book, my friends and I, who were also interested in reptiles and amphibians, Jim Bukowski and John Erickson, we would go to the zoo on Sunday because every Sunday they'd have a public feeding of the reptiles and the alligators. So it was a big attraction. So we would go and go to the zoo and watch the snakes being fed. And one time there was a big crowd in front of the King Cobra cage. So we went down and we were watching and the door opened and a man with a suit and a bow tie held a yellow rat snake on a pair of tongs up for the king cobra. And the king cobra rose up and struck forward.

And it missed the snake and almost got Caulfield's hand and the whole crowd jumped back. Everybody was screaming, you know. Yeah. So then he did it again again and this time the cobra was able to grab the the rat snake and swallowed it and he closed the door and i learned later learned that that was caulfield that was the first time i ever saw him so uh a couple of years later, when I was older, after I graduated from high school, I was working as a doorman in Manhattan, 4 to 12 shift, opening doors for people and hailing cabs. And, you know, it wasn't a very fun job, but I was doing it. And I was married at the time.

I had a couple of kids. So I went to the zoo on speculation, and I just asked to see Korfeld, and he allowed me to come into his office, and I asked him about the possibility of employment. He just told me, he says, I have a whole drawer full of applications here. He says, but if you want, you can fill out an application, and I'll keep it on file. And then I spoke to him for a while and told him how much I was interested in herpetology. And I read his book and all the other books that were available at the time.

There wasn't very many. And that was it. I went home and a couple of months later, I got a call. And it was Koflug. He says, you're still interested in the job? And I said, you bet I am. And he called me to come down on Monday morning and he'd start my training. Cool. Yeah. That was in 1964. Wow. So I worked at the zoo for 14 years what was your main involvement at the zoo or what what

areas did you kind of specialize in i was a reptile keeper i worked in it with the you know the rattlesnake collection that he had and all okay all the other critters yeah so uh nice that was really a good experience and started my learning career. Yeah, absolutely. That sounds fantastic, right? I mean, and it's easy, I think, in some ways for us to sort of idealize that. So, I'm sure there was a lot of good and bad, but yeah, I'm sure it's great memories, hey? And then you started doing work with bog turtles, right? And that turned into, maybe led you into your consulting business.

Yes. While at the zoo, I wanted to do some research, and Caulfield encouraged us to do research. And I wanted to pick an animal that there wasn't that much known about. So I researched it and found out that, you know, we had bog turtles right across the river in New Jersey. I was living on Staten Island at the time. And I contacted a few people from the New York Herb Society that lived in that area, and I found a location where there was a known population.

So I went there and got permission from the landowner to start my studies there. And that's how I started researching bog turtles. Then after a few years, I got contacted by Dr. Richard Bruce from University of Western North Carolina and he asked me to come down to Highlands Biological Station to reconfirm historic records that Ken Nemours had found several years earlier. So I got a grant from the University of Western North Carolina and I went down there. And for three years, I would go down in the spring and I would make two trips a season, early spring and late spring.

We discovered, I think, five new populations and reconfirmed all of Ken Newmores' historic sites. So that was a great experience. Plus, I was in an area that's historic for salamanders. And Dr. Bruce is a salamander specialist. And it was a great experience. And then eventually Dennis Herman from the Atlanta Zoo took over the project I started and he carried that project on for another 20 years.

How are the populations of bog turtles doing these days? It depends on what state you're in some states they have really declined uh other states the core populations are doing quite well okay but uh bog turtles face a lot of predation there's more predators around because people don't trap anymore for the fur industry. And you have just so many predators that eat bog turtles. They only lay an average of three eggs a year. They don't double clutch like some other turtles do. And if a predator finds the eggs, then, you know, it doesn't take long to eat three eggs. Yeah.

Skunks, raccoons, weasel, shrews, and even snakes will eat the eggs. Yeah. They got a big lineup of predators, huh? Yeah. Yeah. But they persist in some areas pretty well then, huh? Yeah. Yeah. But they persist in some areas pretty well then, huh? Yeah. Okay. So I continued working with the bog turtles.

We had a contract with the state of New Jersey, the Endangered Non-Game Species Program. When I left the zoo, that was the first contract I got from my consulting company. I started Herpetological Associates in 1977, and I got a contract with the Endangered Non-Game Species Program from New Jersey to study bog turtles, timber rattlesnakes, corn snakes, and pine snakes. So that started my career as a consultant. And even while I was at the zoo, I would get calls from engineering companies to look for bog turtles along the right-of-ways of potential roads or housing developments. So I started to see that there might be a niche where I could actually earn a living

by studying reptiles and amphibians and getting paid for it. Nice. And the first year I had one contract. It was tough when you had four kids to support. I worked part-time as a musician on weekends in a band i played bass guitar oh cool yeah yeah my dad was a bassist or is a bassist i guess he he doesn't play much anymore but he put himself through college doing uh in a cover band with my mom so yeah yeah kind of fun cool what kind of music did you play at the time it was top 40 music you know cover stuff yeah plus we wrote a lot of

our own stuff too cool yeah good stuff very cool yeah another thing i wanted to mention just because it's uh someone who i think we've all seen a lot of his work but uh I haven't heard that much about him Zig Lashinsky right who I believe you worked with at Staten Island Zoo a super famous photographer you know so many of the classic images that come to my mind were taken by him so I'm just super curious, anything you remember. Ziggy and I remained in contact right up until Ziggy passed away two years ago. He lived five houses down from where I live now in Toms River, New Jersey. And Ziggy did some field work with me. He would go out on jobs and do amphibian surveys and snake surveys.

And I learned a lot about photography from both Ziggy Leszczynski and Manuel Rubio. I'm sure you heard of Manny Rubio. He's also a Staten Islander. And Zig was just amazing he knew how to build sets so it looked like you you're taking a picture out in the woods but it was you know on on our table you know with nice lighting and stuff so uh yeah ziggy was an amazing guy. He was also very good at imitating frogs. He could do each species with our hip boots and we had our flashes, but the frog, we spotted a frog, but he wasn't calling. So we shut off our lights and Ziggy started imitating the barking tree frogs. While he was doing that,

we saw some lights coming towards us, coming closer and closer. And don't you think it was Dick Bartlett came to photograph the walking tree frog? He got a big laugh out of that. Tricking the herpetologist. You're pretty good. He says, you fooled me. That's funny. That's amazing. Yeah.

That's amazing. I was just looking through the John Baylor in the original Audubon Field Guide for Reptiles and Amphibians, the green book. I was looking through the photos in there. I think that was the first reptile book I ever had. And so all those photos are kind of have ingrained in my memory. And I know what you have six or seven photos in that book and uh zig had 60 or something like you know one of the second the most or second most of anybody of all those photos well zig uh after he left the zoo he made a living selling photographs uh he and his wife millie would go around uh on field trips and just take as many you know slides they could. And he worked for an agency called Animals Animals in New York City. So Animals Animals would, you know, promote his photographs. So for years, Ziggy was able to make a living doing that until the digital cameras came out. And then everybody became a photographer.

You know, it's pretty tough to sell pictures anymore yeah i know right that's the other part of that that's so amazing right is given the constraints of film and having the it's so easy now to take innumerable pictures the the quality he was the quality he was getting you know without uh being able to cheat like we can now is amazing when i was taking pictures i mean there was so many things you had to have flash and the lighting had to be just so you're taking slides so it would cost you a lot of money there would be 36 pictures on a roll of slide film then you have to send them to kodak to be developed so you had to pay for the film and then you had to pay for the developing. And if you had a bad picture, you just had to throw them away.

Well, for 40 years, I took 35 millimeter color slides and I had over 30,000 slides in my slide collection, probably even more than that. And I recently just donated them to the museum of natural history because i don't use them anymore and i figured a lot of them had locality data so the american museum of natural history accepted them oh that's cool yeah yeah yeah it's always the question you know what do you because i've just got a library of photos you know that i've taken and i just kind of squirrel them away and you know it's it's hard to go through everything and organize and you know put it out there in a

usable form sometimes so yeah that's a that's good good use of those slides i'm sure to to benefit the museum yeah well it was ziggy that encouraged me and mananny Rubio to do things like that. Yeah. Yeah. You know? Very cool. Plus, I enjoy documenting what I'm seeing and what I find. Right. Sometimes you'll find a snake eating something or some people are lucky enough to get, like, timber rattlesnakes in combat. Yeah. Combat. I still haven't come across that, but my good friend and colleague has photographed it, as many other people have.

But it's just one of those things. It's always great to see those natural history events. I was driving through Western Australia and we saw a snake in the road and it looked kind of strange. And so I got out and it was a big mulga trying to eat a death adder that had been hit by a car and was kind of plastered on the road. And he was trying to peel it off the road to eat it. And so I got out and I was taking pictures and I spooked him a bit and he took off. So I got the death adder off the road with my snake hook and I walked over and gave it to him and he ate it on the side of the road. And I actually just got that published, that observation published in herpetological review. So cool. Yeah.

It should be in the next issue, I guess. So I got word of that a couple of weeks ago, but I included a picture of the snake eating the death adder. Awesome. Yeah. And you mentioned Manny Rubio, certainly his book, Rattlesnakes to the United States and Canada. So in the last, we really like going to Australia, but obviously with COVID and things that that was foreclosed and we were kind of looking for, okay, what can our herping task be? And I was actually inspired by many, many Rubio's book to say, Hey, let's just go find all the things that are in this book, you know, and it kind of in the context of forms herping. So it's,

it's all those things plus recognizing the Eastern black tail and Oh, what's the other one that we, Oh,, and and the cane break atricot at us. But otherwise, it's entirely just the book, you know, in terms of saying, let's make this the task. We're able to accomplish it. So I'm at 24 of 27 of the crotalists right now. I'll give a shot for the other three this year. I need to start working through the sister. I only have one of the cisteris at this point i'm i'm behind him a little bit i think 20 or so so or 21 few behind rob but yeah it's just so inspiring right and and the kind of the the goal became hey in the same way of being inspired by uh mr caulfield's books of saying

maybe the the real answer is hey this this is the vision or the journey. And then that becomes all the venomous reptiles of the United States. And, but it's as the journey inspired by the stories and kind of the, to me, that's really the stuff that's compelling. So I don't know. I just, it's kind of combining both of those, uh, influences or just the influences of, of their work. So I'm super appreciative. I'm curious of your, what's your favorite rattlesnake or which, you know, do you have any fun stories about rattlesnakes? I think my favorite rattlesnake is the timber rattlesnake because I'm so familiar with it and I've been able to study it for years and years and working with Howard Reinhardinet from Trenton State College, we've collaborated on research since the early 1990s.

We've radio tracked over 50 individuals. The pine barrens rattlesnakes are quite different than what we call the mountain or the mountain rattlesnake, timber rattlesnake. I mean, they behave very similar, but the habitat is totally different. In fact, are you familiar that the timber rattlesnake and the pine barrens hibernates in water along the streams? Yeah, that was such a weird thing to find out. You know, I didn't discover it, of course, but yeah but yeah to hear that that was just kind of an odd thing but when you think about it a lot of the dens in the mountains have underground springs so there could be water in some of those dens which helps them to maintain moisture in fact when they come out in the spring some of them are covered in mud

out of the rocky fissures so yeah they may also do the same thing on the ground but unfortunately we can't go down and look and see where they're actually right you know i guess they'll have cameras someday that with can go down there yeah have a little robot crawl down there and film it yeah that's what they do with the gopher tortoises they put cameras on the tortoises back and the tortoise go down the burrow and they can see all the other critters that are down there yeah i was reading uh bruce means uh stalking the plume serpent and he talks about shoving a pipe down there and putting it up to your ear and listening you know for a rattle

or a tortoise you know the exhale of the tortoise and you can tell what you're bumping into with the pipe. I know Bruce Means. We recently were together at a conference in Florida with the Gulf Tortoise Council Conference last fall. We exchanged books. Yeah, he's a great, great author. I watched that show he did, The Last Tapui. Yeah, the National Geographic. Yeah, it was great. Yeah, fun stuff.

When did you start doing research with Joanna Berger from Rutgers. That was 40 years ago. So it was probably about 1981, 82, somewhere around there. I met Joanna. She was on the advisory council for the Endangered Non-Game Species Program. And I was under contract with the state at the time. So I used to go to those meetings.

And she's originally pretty much a an ornithologist she wrote hundreds of papers on birds and ecology from you know all over the world but i was telling her about the pine snakes and how they dig their own nest and she didn't believe me you know snakesakes can't make their own nest. I said, well, you got to come out with me in the spring and I'll show you. Sure enough, she did. And that started it. She just became fascinated with pine snakes.

And I think at this point she likes them more than birds. But she may not admit that, but I think she does. Very cool. That's awesome you guys certainly have put out a ton of great uh super interesting publications and i actually have a whole sequence of questions on pine barrens herping and things that are informed by a lot of that research so yeah it's definitely a tremendous amount that you all have learned i'm sure there's still a lot to to go but tremendous uh sample sizes and things like that oh yeah we uh we've been studying a couple populations for the last 35 years now down in burlington county and up in ocean county

there's a certain dens that we excavate every year. They were originally natural dens, but when we dug them up in the wintertime, we mapped the tunnels like the entrances and we re reconstructed the entrances using cement blocks, but it up against one another. So they formed a tunnel. Yeah. And then we built a

chamber down below a meter down three feet down with some cement blocks and then put a roof over it and then each spring around mid-march before they come out of hibernation we excavate the top from the top down we never disturb the entrance because that has all the scent trails yeah you know for the snakes so we only just dig straight down from the top and we lift the roof off okay the pine snakes dig their burrows they go through the holes in the in the cement blocks and go into the the b horizon sand where they hibernate. Sometimes there's two or three of them together. Sometimes there's one alone. So every year we reconstruct the den, and then we can go there and find the snakes.

And we've had some snakes. We inject PIT tags in them. Those are little microchips. They're passive, so you need a reader to read the chip. I'm sure you're familiar with it. So we've had hatchlings that we put in the dens and we've

been able to document survivorship and growth and longevity. What we learned was a female pine snake, the average lifespan in the wild is 16 years and the average lifespan of an adult male is 25 years wow and the reason is that the pine snakes the female pines are so vulnerable when they're nesting they nest out in the open in open sunny areas where they dig their burrows and while they're digging uh red-tailed

hawks fox coyote and poachers can find them very easily yeah so that's why there's a big difference between the survivorship of males versus females sure is is the population kind of imbalanced because of that do you see a lot more males than you do females? We're starting to notice that trend. Not only are they being predated, we also have a new predator that's very common in the pine barrens now. It's the coyote, the eastern coyote. And the red fox and gray fox and skunk, they all dig up the eggs and eat them. Or, again, we have a problem with poaching.

So between the predators and the poachers, the pine snake population is starting to crash in the pine barrens. Is there any kind of head start program that's been? Well, Joanna and I have been doing that at our studying areas for years okay we'll take the eggs back to the lab yeah incubate them hatch them out and then put pit tags and all the babies and then put them back at the nesting areas we actually take the eggs back and we bury them in the ground where they would normally be anyway because we think the shed skins from the hatchlings and the eggs back and we bury them in the ground where they would normally be anyway because we think the shed skins from the hatchlings and the eggshells uh what helps guides the snakes

back to the nesting area they have a fidelity to the nesting area oh interesting so they you know the females return uh the mother and then daughters and sisters all come back to the same nesting area where they reproduce. But the problem with that is once predators learn where those nesting areas are, they get eaten. So by taking the eggs and hatching them in the lab, we're protecting those cohorts yeah but some years uh there's not a lot of the same snakes coming back that they may skip a year if they don't get enough food or they could be they could have been killed during the rest of the season by a mammal predator or run over on a road and then you know that little population would die out. Sure.

You mentioned the scent trails at the dens as well. Is that important for site fidelity as well? If those are messed up, do they seek another place of refuge? Yeah. I mean, especially if they have the scent of a predator around, they may avoid that den and go somewhere else. We've learned that pine snakes don't always hibernate at the same area, especially males. Males tend to bounce around. They shift dens from one season to the next. But females tend

to have a better fidelity to a den and to a nesting area. But, that makes sense. With all snakes, chemical cues, scent trails are very important. As you know, the snake's forked tongue is how they find their way around in the world. A snake's sense of smell is probably equal to, if not better than a canine, than a dog or a fox. They have a tremendous ability to scent trail. That's how they follow their way around and get to learn things and find their food and where their hibernacula are, where their nesting areas are.

It's all imprinted in their brain. They learn over time. Yeah. Do we know how long the scent trails can last? It's hard to determine how long they last. If a snake is returning to the same area year after year, and through radio tracking, we've learned that they have a pattern that when they branch out from their hibernacula, as the snake gets older, sometimes they move further and further away from the den and learn new areas to find food. And then come back and hibernate in the same area or one of the other areas that they've learned about.

They're communal. They share dens. When the males are searching for the females in the spring, they learn where the females hang out and they'll go back to those same areas where the females are. It's quite interesting what these animals do. It seems like we never stop learning new things. You know, the more you learn, then the more questions get raised. Yeah.

The more you find out, you don't know much. You know, how fascinating. I just love the idea of radio tracking a species and learning about what they do in the wild. That's so fascinating. Yeah, radio tracking has really taught a lot of herpetologists and scientists about snake ecology. Prior to that, it was just chance encounters, you know, trying to trap but you know it's only a snapshot into what their life history really is yeah kind of limited information you can gather from those recaptures yeah as part of your um nesting uh research have you ever found infertile eggs in the wild i know there's been a lot of discussion for the captive community as to whether are slugs a product of captivity or are they a natural phenomenon?

No, there's times when there's what we call infertile or just plugs. It happens. I believe it's because maybe the snake didn't mate that season, because they can retain fertile sperm in their ovidocs. So she may lay the normal or average clutch of an adult pine snake is nine eggs. But it ranges from four eggs up to the most we ever found from one female is 14 eggs. And their eggs are big. I mean, they're the size of chicken eggs. Maybe just a little more elongate, but they're very large, leathery shells.

Yeah, absolutely. One herping story I was hoping to get to that's mentioned in gary williamson's book uh on his letters with carl kaufeld was uh your alligator river incident in 1971 and i know so kind of a road cruising story right and maybe instructive for all of us to go road cruising yeah well i was with uh ray mendez, who formerly worked at the American Museum of Natural History and then went off on his own as a consultant. He has done some wonderful things throughout his career. He worked for Hollywood movies. He worked on Silence of the horror movies and things like that.

And he does a lot of panoramas and dioramas for zoos and exhibits. So Ray Mendez was driving his car. My colleague Ed Johnson was in the back. And we started road cruising. This is down in North Carolina, Hyde County, and some of those around Lake Manimouskete area. And I thought, what if I sat up on the front bumper and held onto the roof rack and I'd be able to see the road better. So I had my right hand on the roof rack and I had my flashlight in my left

hand and I would scan the shoulder. So we could see what, you know, a wide range of what might be on the road. So we would doing quite well finding corn snakes, a couple of cane breaks and lots of amphibians. It was really a great night. And the problem was there was a lot of mosquitoes out, too. And they kept getting in my eyes, and I was trying to slap a mosquito. Well, one time I took my hand off the roof rack to slap a mosquito.

And at the same instant, Ray and Ed saw a big snake on the road, and they jammed the brakes on. Oh, no. So obviously gravity pushed me right off the front bumper, and I landed on my head. Oh. And actually fractured my skull. But I was laying there, and the guys thought I was fooling around.

They said, come on, Bob, get up. Let's see this snake. And they rolled me over, and there guys thought I was fooling around. They said, come on, Bob, get up. Let's see this snake. And they rolled me over, and there was blood coming out of my ear. So they put me in the car, and we were like miles from any civilization. They found a pay phone, and they called an ambulance, and the ambulance came and took me to the hospital. Oh, man. That's how I got a fractured skull. Oh, go.

I had a similar experience out backpacking with my cousin. I was riding on the hood of the car because I was getting car sick. And he was driving slow at first but kept getting faster and faster. And then there was a big rock in the middle of the road that he slammed on the brakes. And so I went flying and skidding along the road and the car was coming faster and skidding and ran over my foot and flipped my shoe across the desert and so and and it broke a bone or two in my foot and so i i and then we hiked for about a mile trying to find this canyon entrance and that was not a very great experience yeah well when i when i was in the hospital my brain started to swell

yeah the doctors thought they were going to have to operate cut my skull open so luckily the day they came to do the operation, I started to get feeling in my eye because my eye wasn't blinking or anything. The whole side of my face was just numb. It was just sitting there. If I smiled, only one part of my lip would go up and the other part would just stay solid. Yeah. Oh, man. Of course, I had a swollen brain.

But luckily, it cleared up on its own. The swelling went down and I didn't have to get my operation. That's good. Man. Yeah, those head injuries are no joke. Yeah. Scary. Oh, my goodness.

So in Snakes and Snake Hunting that we mentioned a couple times, Carl famous in the Crossley Pines and Corns section describes the pine barrens as being full of snakes, but it doesn't yield its snakes easily. And I know you've kind of repeated that line as just so accurate. And certainly that's been my very short lived experience of it out there. Um, so I did, uh, kind of want to talk through what, what pine, what, you know, good choices and bad choices in terms of pine barrens herping and, and kind of lessons learned or lessons you're willing to impart. Um, the one thing that I've noticed really strongly throughout your work has been talking about sort of the complexities of systems rather than looking for animals, it's looking for the right conditions based on soil type, topography, sort of the flora assemblages, those sorts of things.

Would you say that's accurate? It's accurate, and it helps you to better understand where you might want to look for snakes. But knowing the snake's ecology is important too. You have to dovetail those two things together. And through radio tracking, we were able to learn because pine snakes and hognose and black racers, they're all diurnal species. But kink snakes and corn snakes and coastal plain milk snakes

tend to become very nocturnal during the warmer months, June, July, August, early September. So they're more secretive snakes, harder to find. If you're driving around, you have a good chance of finding one of the diurnal species crossing a sand road or a paved road. And unfortunately, they often get killed when they do that. We've lost a lot of our radio-tracked snakes crossing roads. But getting back to the way to look for them, by radio-tracking, we learned that corn snakes are very secretive. That's why you don't see them that often. But what we also learned was the corn snake will sometimes be a community nester.

Females will go to a nice, what we call a paleodune. It's a natural sand ridge where there's less vegetation and they're much more open. Even gravid timber rattlesnakes will use those as gestation sites. So a lot of the egg-laying snakes go there, pines, corns, hognose, kings, to lay their eggs in these paleodunes. So we found one area where it was a community corn snake nesting site. And we counted 64 destroyed corn snake eggs at this one site.

And one clutch of coastal plain milk snakes were there too. So what we did is in order to protect the eggs, we took large plastic boxes, we drilled holes in them, we put PVC pipe, and the PVC pipe would connect to the mole tunnels because that's where the corn snakes crawl down into the mole tunnels and they make chambers and they lay their eggs there. Interesting. We connected the PVC pipe into the box that we had. We put the sand in there so that when the snake crawled through the PVC pipe, it would come out into a nice sandy area. And sure enough enough they worked but they only worked because there was a

couple of large old adult females that that was their traditional nesting site so the first two years we had a lot of snakes nesting in our boxes i mean this was at two separate locations but uh what happened was those old females got killed by predators so then there was no more scent trails for the young snakes the young females to follow so those nesting sites became abandoned so uh it's hard to find corn snake nesting sites we we only found two where more than uh two females nested one had uh we found five clutches of eggs there and another one had four clutches of eggs like like hatched out you know old old eggshells kind of thing no when we put our boxes that's what we found oh gotcha gotcha laid gotcha. Laid eggs, yeah.

So before that, the destroyed eggs, we were able to just count all the eggshells on the surface. Yeah. Where the animals had eaten the contents and just left the shells scattered around. Gotcha. I read about some sites that had, you know, numerous eggshells from previous seasons and things like that where they'd kind of accumulate because the site was good enough that it was protected. That's what you see with the pine snake nest. Okay. When you excavate a burrow, you'll find shells from the previous year. They usually last at least two years in the ground before the insects or they just fall apart gotcha okay there

was one nest we found out by the crossley area several years ago we saw a nice big dump pile the dump pile is what the snakes pull out to make the burrow so germano and I excavated that burrow, and first we found one clutch of pine snake eggs, and there was a second clutch of pine snake eggs, and then a third clutch of pine snake eggs. Wow. At the back of the tunnel, there was a gravid female that didn't lay yet. So, you know, there was a community nesting site,

and unfortunately the following year and for the following several years, no snakes came back to that area to nest. Now, we don't know whether those females were killed by predators, were they collected, or because we disturbed the area, they didn't come back.

But we never could figure out why no other female came back to nest that one particular spot. Yeah, that's a head-scratcher for sure. And I guess you weren't able to radio track the one that was there, that was present, the gravid female? We could have radio tracked it, but at the time we figured, oh, they'll come back next year. Oh, yeah. So that's why you'll,

if you capture a female in the spring, especially in a new area where you haven't been studying them, you want to radio track it to see A, where it's going to nest and B, where it's going to hibernate. So radio tracking allows you to discover those things. I imagine the excavation of that burrow system to find the eggs and the gravid female,

that must have been a pretty delicate excavation to not damage the eggs. They're not that deep. They're not that deep. The eggs are usually 8 to 10 inches below the surface. Okay. Interesting. They only dig in areas where there's some kind of structure. There's certain plants that grow in the open, sunny areas.

Pennsylvania sedge, pine barren sandwort, hudsonia, golden heather. Those are plants that like open open sunny areas and not shaded so they never nest in the forest where it's shaded or not enough heat to incubate the eggs gotcha takes approximately eight weeks eight to eight and a half weeks in the wild for the eggs to hatch and what's the um i guess, what are the eggs surrounded? Do they have kind of a pocket, you know, air around them or is it good? After the female digs her tunnel, then she makes a wider chamber where she can coil around just a little bit

bigger than her body when it's coiled. Yeah. Then she lays the eggs there. And sometimes she'll move as she lays each egg. So sometimes the eggs will be in a line. Other times they're clustered together. And once they dry, they adhere together in a solid mass. Okay.

Yeah. So, and then the babies will, there's a little, like a half inch to an inch airspace above them. So when they're hatching, they have a little area so they can clear their lungs and start breathing the air. Yeah. Do they backfill? No, she doesn't backfill. She just crawls.

Once she's done and she's rested, then she just leaves the nesting area, goes off into the forest, in her home range to build up the body weight that she lost from laying all those large eggs. They lose almost 50% of their body weight when they nest. Sure, yeah. It's amazing how much resources those females put into the offspring. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What a tragedy when a predator finds them you know that's that's rough but very interesting do you know how long the babies stay at the after they hatch stay at the nest stay around the nesting burrow until they shed okay and that's

sometimes they shed in the tunnel and sometimes they come up to the surface. They usually come straight up from the nest chamber. They don't leave through the tunnel because the tunnel entrance over time gets filled in from the rain and from the wind. And the entrance gets closed. So they come straight up and then they bask in the grasses or whatever little cover they have around there. And once they shed their skin, they fan out and start to learn about where their den might be. And again, they follow the scent trails of the adults, females that left the area. Okay.

That's interesting. It appears that those scent trails do stay around for quite a while yeah and then those hatchlings become imprinted to that nesting area okay so when they're coming out through the surface do they work kind of in in concert to kind of dig dig out like maybe like a sea turtle nester you know the first one makes the the hole he'll dig the little hole because they have that little snout and they're very strong they're powerful little snakes they're about 12 to 13 inches long when they hatch yeah and uh they burrow up and then the others will follow the work of the first one. Sometimes there'll be two

or three holes around a nesting area, but usually it's only one or two. And then they'll bask, they'll shed, and then they leave. Okay. Yeah. That's neat. Have you ever come upon hatching pine snakes? Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I guess that's how you know all these answers. When we first were doing our studies, we wanted to know what the incubation temperature was in a natural nest.

So we put temperature recording devices down next to the egg clutch and would monitor them. And then what we did is we built corrals around the nesting area so that we'd be able to capture all the young once they hatch. Yeah. And that's when we learned that other species of snakes parasitized the work of the pine snake and they'll lay their eggs in the pine snake burrow as well. So we've documented eastern hognose, corn snake, black racer, and even eastern king snake all parasitize the work of the pine snake and lay their eggs in there as well. Interesting.

Is the substrate, the sand, is it pretty moist or is it you know dry no there's some even in a dry sunny area when you dig down a few inches you start to see a little bit of moisture you get down several inches then it's it's it's very moist sand okay gotcha uh that's that's very uh very neat stuff you've discovered through your and then And then when it rains, the rain percolates very easily through the sand and gets down into the aquifer. Okay. Yeah. So you've mentioned it a couple times. I've had from herping, and I know Justin has had the same question, is sort of the, it's such a wide range in appearance in terms of rate of encounter between pituitary office, sort of west

of the Mississippi and east of the Mississippi. And in terms of taking in a lot of your research, it seems like a function of that might be the ratio of open areas, right? So basking in the West is so much easier than it is in the East that it's almost access to basking area as a limiting factor for populations of, I guess, potentially all snakes in the Pine Barrens or that type of habitat. Well, even in, even in the forest floor, there's always little patches of openings, you know, where sunlight is hitting the forest floor. So basking is not a problem.

It's having enough heat to hatch the eggs out. Otherwise, once they're done laying eggs, they're in the forest. All the snakes in the pine barrens live in the forest. It could be dense. It could be very thick. It could be edges of wetlands. All the snakes in the pine barrens live in the forest. It could be dense. It could be very thick. It could be edges of wetlands. Certain species of small mammals are more common in wetland corridors than common in the upland dry areas,

but all the different meadow voles live in the wetland because they prefer wetter habitats where they forage. So the snakes learn that, and they spend a lot of time. They go where the food is. Yeah. Very interesting. If you're a mammologist, you'll come across snakes when you're doing your mammal work. I imagine they time their hatching to when the food is abundant, prey is abundant. There is a correlation between the amount of prey. And that's what we found when we were radio tracking

that a lot of the snakes, even pine snakes, go into wetlands to forage. And they're also pretty good climbers. They'll go up in trees looking for bird nests. We were tracking one female down down in uh in mount misery corfel wrote a a chapter called memories of mount misery yeah and we were tracking a pine snake there and i was following the signal and with radio tracking the closer you get the louder the signal is it's a directional antenna so you have to keep lowering the volume to figure out where the snake

is and i was walking around this this big pine tree and the signal was loud but i couldn't find the snake and then finally i i took a rest and i i put my antenna up and then the signal got real loud i realized the snake was up in the tree. So I had to keep looking and looking. And the pine snake was 50 feet up in the top of the pine tree. Oh, wow. At a robin's nest. And I could hear the two adult, you know, the male and female robin was scolding the snake. And it was going on all the time, but it just didn't click while I was listening to the beeping of the receiver, you know?

Yeah. So finally I looked up and I saw that the snake was up there eating the baby robins out of the nest. And we've seen that several other times. Pine snakes are finding bird nests up in the trees. Now, if they're crawling on the ground, how do they know that nest is up there? Right. You there? Right. You know? Yeah.

And some birds go through the trouble of carrying their droppings away from a nest, but I guess some species don't. But there must be some kind of scent trail around there. Or did the snake just, it learned that birds nest up in trees. So if I go up in a tree and I climb around on the limbs, I might find a nest. But we've seen that several times where the snakes are foraging up in trees. Really? We found a couple of pine snakes by listening to the birds. Yeah.

The birds will be scolding them. And you keep investigating. And sure enough, you come across a pine snake or timber rattlesnake or or a corn snake yeah that's very interesting and when when they're up um did you ever find them in trees that didn't have nests or did it seem like they they kind of yeah in in the fall at one of our long-term study areas, we found them up there just basking, getting as much heat as they could. But the other reason they climb trees is to avoid predators. Yeah.

When I'm radio tracking certain animals, individual pine snakes, because there was very low uh amount of vegetation on the forest floor where you could see them easily they climb the trees to get away from the you know the approaching human yeah that's really interesting um coming off of you mentioning that mount misery piece have you um is it fair to say that uh spots that kaufeld's books popularized there there are still animals there or or was that popularity did that turn out to have a sort of negative impact? Well, it had a negative impact on the Crosley area. Because people read the book and they would go to Crosley. Everybody knows where Crosley is. And those snake populations have crashed drastically. Even though the state

has now preserved over, I think it's 3,500 acres of Crosley has been preserved over, I think it's 3,500 acres of Crosley has been preserved by both the state and the township, Natural Lands Trust. There's many people still go there and steal the snakes. Years ago, I used to have a lot of cover boards out along there, and I had built artificial dens. But I stopped putting cover boards out because people would flip them and leave them to overturn and not putting them back and just stealing the snakes, you know.

Yeah. Shameful behavior. And it seems so counterintuitive that they would risk the health of the snake just to find one. If they care about the snakes, why aren't they caring about where the snakes live and those kind of things? It just makes no sense. I mentioned that we built artificial dens. That was a mitigation project. I guess it was 40 years ago the uh the utility company wanted to put a sewer line along a three-mile section.

And they worked quite well. But people learned about them, and some people would break the entrance pipes and try to dig them up. And some of the material we originally used they were called orangeberg pipe it was before pvc pipe was available and orangeberg is sort of a softer material and over time they will collapse in which i didn't know at the time when i put them in there but some of the entrance pipes would get blocked. But there's at least five of those original dens where the entrance pipes didn't get blocked.

And 40 years later, they're still being used by snakes. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Absolutely. Well, so you mentioned artificial cover i there's not which i think i take as good news for the most part in our experiences around the pine barrens there's not actually that much um sort of trash or debris it doesn't you can find there are a couple of spots right that it you'll run into it a lot but compared to other places that we herp there is actually not a ton of truly artificial cover did at the same time in each instance that i've

found some there's been nothing underneath it i don't and that could just be a reflection of you know sort of the difficulty of the pine barrens or do you find that uh artificial cover works well in that habitat um or is it... Artificial cover works if you set up the artificial cover correctly and you put it in an area that looks suitable where there's some kind of structure where a snake might use. Artificial cover has worked fairly successful for us because we will select an area where there's a fallen log or a stump hole.

Or it's a nice edge area where a snake might come out to bask. And sometimes if you look for shed skins, if you find shed skins in the forest, snakes usually have established what I call shedding stations where they return to shed their skins. So that's the place to put cover. Yeah, it makes sense. I was just going to say an example of how cover works. I was working on a pipeline up in North Jersey doing monitoring. We had to remove any reptiles or amphibians that were in the way of construction work. So I found this big, thick rubber mat.

It looked like a piece of an old conveyor belt and the day before i had seen this beautiful copperhead basking uh in this rocky area so i took the and it shot down a hole and i wasn't able to catch it so i took that piece of rubber and i laid it on that spot and the following day late afternoon i came back and lifted, and there was the copperhead. They won't catch it. So sometimes it'll work that quick if you know that there's a snake in the area. We subsequently radio-tracked that copperhead to find out where its den was, and we did discover it was a new den in northern New Jersey.

Oh, wow. The copperhead was just made a threatened species by the state of New Jersey. So was the scarlet snake. The northern scarlet snake was officially made a threatened species. Yeah. I mean, that's, I guess, sad, but also good that they're protecting them and their habitat. If funding becomes available, we'll be able to do some pretty good research. In fact, the state of New Jersey just hired a Ph.D. from Rutgers University to do a major study on the northern copperhead in New Jersey under a research grant.

Yeah. Those copperheads, they're a beautiful species. That'd be sad to see those disappear yeah we only have two venomous snakes in new jersey the timber rattlesnake and the northern copperhead or the eastern copperhead as they call it now yeah i finally got to see a copperhead in the wild in delaware uh what a couple years back now but yeah what a beautiful snake it was amazing too because we we saw it you know we we knew that it crawled and and knew kind of where it was and then you see kind of part of the body but it's just so amazing they're crypts you know when they're in

that leaf litter yeah yeah you can barely make out where they are. And then, oh, there's its head right there. It's kind of, it's fun, fun species for sure. Well, we have 23 species of snakes in New Jersey. And the rarest is probably the queen snake. It's the only species that I personally have never caught in New Jersey. I've gotten lots of them in Pennsylvania and down south, but never got a New Jersey queen snake. But all the other species that occur in New Jersey, I've gotten over my career. Nice. That's amazing. Beyond the obvious sort of seasonality implied by the wintertime,

in terms of herping the pine barrens, are there times of year that are better to find animals or that you're more likely to find snakes, particularly pine snakes or corn snakes versus others? Well, I always said that late May and June are the peak times to find snakes because they're mating in May and early June and their females are nesting in late June and even into the early July. After July, August, July and August are not good times to look for snakes in the pine barrens. They're in the forest, all the vegetation is high, and they're just very hard to see. You can get lucky.

You can find one crossing a road or undercover, but the spring is the best time. Then in the fall, in mid-September, early October, you'll find a lot of the hatchlings, all the little dum-dums are crawling around, so you'll find them. Right, that has been a theme of our herping generally, is you do tend to find smaller animals, juveniles or to newborn animals, at a much greater rate of incidence, right?

That's certainly something I think we've seen between maybe, yeah, their lack of familiarity or perception of a threat, and they might not have as established of a range. Well, that's true. They're just on the learning curve of how to survive in this new environment where they've crawled out of the egg. Where they hatch from, that's the center of their universe. So the learning curve starts as soon as they leave the egg. Where they hatch from, that's the center of their universe. So that the learning curve starts as soon as they leave the egg. They've taken in a lot of information with their Jacobson's organ

finding out how to survive. And that's when a lot of predation occurs. Some different studies have found that up to 60 percent of a of a hatchling group will be predated in the first year of life yeah yep i guess you know they've got they're part of the food web so that's uh you know one of those hard things to appreciate. It's amazing how much mortality there is for those young snakes. With some of our head starting with corn snakes, we have been successful. We did two different

studies. One, we did some head starting by keeping them over the first winter and feeding them and getting get them to grow a little bit yeah others what we call cold release after they hatched we pit tagged them and just released them yeah but we've we've gotten back up to uh about 25 percent of all the animals that we either had started or cold released. Some of those are surviving and reproducing in three years. Yeah. In the wild.

Yeah. When do they stop being dum-dums and start being a little more savvy to avoiding predators. If they get through the first one or two winters, then they learn how to survive pretty good. But even big adults sometimes just get taken. Yeah. Especially, like I said, the difference between a male and a female pine snake. Right. Females, 16 years. Males, 25 years.

It's kind of wrong, wrong place, wrong time type thing. That's right. Yeah. Interesting. Have you done much work with the pine barren tree frogs? Talk about an amazing. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. When I was at the zoo, I was charged with setting up an amphibian exhibit. So I would go down to the Pine Barrens in May. May is the best time to hear them calling. You get a humid evening or drizzly, rainy night and large choruses of pimer and street frogs so they're they're doing okay because other than when they're calling when they're not calling you can't only ever find one it's so secretive yeah their coloration just blends in with the the leaves and the grasses and the sphagnum moss.

Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. So, yeah, a handful more things here. So our lived experience in the Pine Barrens, as short as it's been, is that it has the greatest density I've encountered of ticks and chiggers that you have to try and engage with or mitigate as you're out in the field. Is that sort of unique to our experience or we're doing it wrong or the wrong time of year or particular years? Or is that always sort of the case? It's always part of the being out in the field and the pine barrens.

You have ticks, ch jiggers and then you have the what they call the deer flies and the green eyes go green head flies there's a lot of biting insects and arachnids in the pine barrens i can show you my scars i've had Lyme disease a few times you know especially when you're radio tracking, you're going through the thickest vegetation. By the time you get back to the car, you have ticks running all over you. Sometimes they fall off in the car and you go in the next day and then you get reinfested with them. Yeah, we've experienced some of that.

Probably not to the extent you have, but yeah. We have the deer tick, and that's the one that carries the Lyme disease. In North Jersey, you have the wood tick, or the dog tick, they call them. Yeah. We're kind of spoiled in the West. We don't have those issues out here, except for rare occasions. Yeah, I know. I've been out there recently in the last four years.

I made two trips a month at a time. Okay. The nice thing was there was no mosquitoes, no flies, no ticks. So it was kind of a pleasure. Yeah. A lot of energy on the road. Yeah. Where'd you go?

I stayed at Bob Ashley's place place oh yeah jericho desert museum yeah great great place yeah they showed me some of the really beautiful areas out there yeah yeah did you make it up to find some price i and uh i was up looking for pride size several times. I just didn't have any luck. Okay. The state has closed off some of those talus areas. Yeah. We were looking on the edges of those or looking for other habitats. I was with Chuck Smith, who knows how to find them.

Yeah. In fact, on the way down, a car was stopped in front of us and one got run over on the road. So that was the only price I got to see in the wild was a dealer. That's the worst kind. Yeah. But I did get to see Willards and a lot of other neat, you know, black, Arizona black and Mojaves. Such a diversity of crotalists out there. Yeah, it's fantastic.

I was really thrilled to get a couple of the green rat snakes. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. That's fun. Lots of gopher snakes, too. Yeah. They're beautiful, though.

Very good gophers. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of the strange thing for for me is you know growing up in utah the gopher snakes are everywhere the great basin gophers and they're one of the more uh commonly found snakes those in the garter snakes and so to hear about all these rare pine snakes and difficult to find you know pichuophus is kind of a different different uh plane yeah just trying to figure it out, right? I was saying, what are the key distinguishing factors?

Is it openness? Is it basking? Is it elevation? Is it above-ground hiding spots as opposed to being all sort of a subterranean lifestyle? Right. Well, I've always wondered, especially with the Florida pine snake, the black pine snake, the Louisiana pine snake, nobody has ever told me where they nest. Even people at the radio tracking them didn't actually identify a clutch of eggs in the wild. And my theory is they probably do the same thing. In fact, Jeff Bean from the North Carolina State Museum

has been radio tracking pine snakes and he found that they do make their own nesting burrows in North Carolina. So I guess with the Florida pine snake, what they probably do, and same with the Louisiana pine snake, is they just burrow down into a pocket gopher burrow. Because the pocket gopher already made the tunnel system under the ground.

And they probably just merely dig a side chamber, lay their eggs there. But nobody's published anything that has answered that question that's my theory anyway yeah that's the the key i guess is to fund some of those projects so we can get some answers right yeah absolutely have you had the good fortune to see any of those three eastern pine snakes in terms of the Florida? I've captured several of the Florida pine snakes because I lived in Florida for eight years. And I was able to go out and catch Florida pines and find several DORs, but got to see them in the wild. The other thing I saw right in my backyard where I lived, I had a colony of gopher tortoises in my yard.

One morning I went out and I looked, I was watching the tortoises, and out of one of the burrows I saw this head sticking up. And I looked and walked over closer, and it was an indigo snake oh that's amazing very beautiful indigo snake in my own backyard oh nice that's fantastic yeah i have a soft spot for tortoises yeah we've got a pretty good population down in the southwest corner of utah that i've uh you know found numerous uh burrows and and well a lot of different tortoises out there. Yeah, it's a neat animal. Yeah, for sure.

Well, tunnelers for sure. Another kind of general question we always try and ask guests and engage with is when you're looking in the field, particularly in a new area, do you tend kind of walk slowly um and just sort of you're kind of carefully scanning for habitat do you go quickly do you tend to stick to trail systems are you bashing through the bush what for people not familiar with the area not radio tracking things what sort of your suggested methodology what i usually do is i'll look for habitat structure you try to think like a snake i mean i'm fortunate enough to have studied a lot of these species for many years so i kind of have an idea what what a snake would like or where it wants to be. So you do both. You walk along the edges of trails or sand roads.

You look for hollow trees or dead trees with loose bark. You look in stump holes where the snake might be basking near a stump hole or go back to the the most typical thing people collectors like to do is is flipping uh tin or plywood or old garage doors whatever you can flip i remember my first trip to south carolina my buddy jim pokoske and I saw this falling down building with all tin out in the field. And there was one 16-foot piece of tin, and we got on either end of it and lifted it. And on Jimmy's end, there was a canebrake rattlesnake. On my end, there was a corn snake.

And in the middle, there was a king snake, all on the same piece of tin. Wow. That's cool. You turn the right thing over and you're going to find something. On another time, there was a barn door that had fallen down. And it was one piece laying on top of the other piece. So we picked up the first piece. And there was a big yellow rat snake under it. We caught the snake. And we picked up the second piece. And there was a big yellow rat snake under it. We caught the snake and we picked up the second piece and there was a second

yellow rat snake. One was a male, one was a female. Wow. That's cool. I once picked up or flipped a piece of tin and, and, uh, and, and I heard rattling, uh, but you know, it wasn't underneath it. And it was a piece of tin that had folded over. And this little rock rattlesnake clobber was in the middle of the tin sheet where it had folded over. It was sandwiched in there.

Yeah. And if he wouldn't have rattled, I wouldn't have known he was there. Yeah. So when you're in a new area, you kind of just have to use your instincts. But look at all different kind of habitat types. I mean, the time of the day and the season also helps. And whether it's a humid day, you know, weather always influences reptile behavior. Do they tend to avoid the rain or do they come out more frequently? Some species love the rain.

Yeah. They'll go out crawling, especially things like copperheads and cottonmouths. Yeah. Because a lot of frogs and salamanders are active during the rain, so they can go out and catch them easily. Gotcha. Yeah. during the rain so they can go out and catch them easily gotcha yeah how does um cloud cover fit into that is it generally speaking particularly in the context of pine snakes is are sort of clear days you're more likely to see one on a clear day or on sort of a warm but cloudy where the sun's maybe trying to poke through?

Well, they'll be active on either a cloudy or a sunny day. But the nice thing about overcast, cloudy days is there's no shadows. You can see the forest floor much better without the shadows because the contrasting light makes it harder to focus in on something. So if your search image, you're looking for a certain pattern or a coil of a snake, it's much easier to do on an overcast, humid day. So those are always, in my experience, those are the best collecting days. It has to be warm and humid and overcast. But if you're just turning things, flipping rocks or cover, any kind of weather

will do. That's a great expert tip. I hadn't thought of it in the context of seeing the bottom of the forest floor. That's really great. Yeah, absolutely. I guess that leads into another question that we kind of like to engage with often is, do you have a preference for finding, obviously finding the

snake is the important thing, but do you have a preference for seeing kind of as you're hiking and finding them out on the crawl? Does that bring you a different level of joy than flipping something? Yes. It's always nice to actually see one from a distance. Yeah. It just, and what I do, if I, if I'm lucky enough to see something like that, I'll stay there and kind of watch to see what it's doing instead of running

up and grabbing it, watch it for a while. But the danger of doing that is if there's a hole there, it could shoot down the hole and you don't actually get to have it in a while. But the danger of doing that is if there's a hole there, it could shoot down the hole and you don't actually get to have it in your hand. But that's when your phone comes in handy. Take pictures before you try to catch it. I always like to get in-situ pictures where the snake has coiled so perfectly. It's very hard to duplicate that when you're trying to pose a snake. Right.

Some snakes don't want to sit still. They just want to get away. Yeah. Yeah. I've learned that lesson the hard way a lot of times. Take picture first, then go for a grab or closer investigation. Yeah, that's for sure. It's always exciting to see them doing things, natural behavior. Right. Yeah, that's the best way to learn what they're doing out there, you know.

If you just run up and grab them, you don't get that because then they just go into defensive or flight mode and you don't get much natural behavior other than run away or defend so yeah very cool well thank you so much bob this has been fantastic there's a ton here and yeah i i really appreciate your time and yeah a ton of great insight both in terms of i guess one thing i will highlight on your behalf, right, is your website for Herpetological Associates. Your publications, most of them, right, are available as PDF on the website and just so much great information there. Yep. And if you guys come to the Pine Barrens, give me a call. Come in June.

I'll show you some pine snakes digging that's amazing we actually are and I'm glad that all this talk of June is great news relative to the plans we've already made it's truly great yeah

well it was nice to meet you guys, Justin and Bob yeah, great meeting you. Hopefully I'll see you again. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much, Justin. Bob, if you want to hang out for one second, Justin, do you want to say other than, you know, we're really grateful that Bob came on and talked with us tonight. And we're really excited about the content. And, yeah, thanks again. And we're grateful for the support on our podcast with Eric and Owen and the Morelia Python Radio team.

And thanks for listening. And we'll catch you again next week.