Jeremy herps!: April 2006

Earlier this month, I went on a trip to Gus Engeling Wildlife Management Area (WMA) with about 8 other students and my advisor. I really wanted to go on this trip because the area we visited was about 30 minutes from my home, where my parents still live. I picked up herping as a hobby since I've been in college and in different towns, and while I explore the area around my hometown as time permits when I'm home, I haven't done any major searching around there to see what species I can find. The Gus Engeling WMA sits on the western edge of the east Texas piney woods ecoregion. Because of its location, there is a really interesting mix of deciduous bottomland forest and pine tree, sandy-soil uplands. We had a great time. The weather was a nice, warm break from a chill we were having in the panhandle, and we didn't do too shabby on the herps we found either. We found 29.5 species in all, 3 of which I had never seen before. We found a lesser siren, a red-spotted newt, northern cricket frogs, green treefrogs, gray treefrogs, Woodhouse's toad, American bullfrog, bronze frog, southern leopard frog, an eastern narrowmouth, common snapping turtle, eastern mud turle, razorback musk turtle, stinkpot, red-eared slider, American alligator, green anole, fence lizard, five-lined skink, ground skink, six-lined racerunner, eastern yellowbelly racer, Texas ratsnakes, one of the prettiest eastern coachwhips I've ever seen, yellow-bellied watersnake, diamondback watersnake, rough green snake, western ribbon snake, and many copperheads.

Red-spotted newt

Green treefrog & Gray treefrog

Bronze frog

Eastern narrowmouth

Yellow mud turtle

Razorback musk turtle

Stinkpot

American alligator

Carnivorous pitcher plants in a bog

Green anole

Five-lined skink

Eastern yellowbelly racer

Texas ratsnake

Texas ratsnake (young)

Deciduous forest with fern understory

Eastern coachwhip

Yellowbelly watersnake

Yellowbelly watersnake (young)

Western ribbon snake

Rough green snake

Copperhead

I said we found 29.5 species on the trip. "Where did you get the half," you ask? Well, we found a toad that we believe to be a hybrid between a coastal plain toad and a Woodhouse's toad. While we found toads that were definitely Woodhouse's toads, we never found a full-blooded coastal plain toad, but we did find "a half" in this hybrid.

Coastal plain X Woodhouse's toad hybrid?

Some of the research I'm currently doing with Texas horned lizards involves attempting to analyze their diet. I take fecal pellets that were collected from my study site over the years, break them up under a stereoscope, and identify the heads of the insects within, which are mostly ants. I started taking pictures of some of the heads (and sometimes bodies) for identification through a special scope attachment, and I thought I'd throw a few of them on here for people to see. I take nice, standardized pictures for documentation, but most of these were just me having fun.