Colorado Herping: Southeast counties May 16-17

I’ve written this blog as an homage to the animals and ecosystems that I visited, but in so doing I’ve chosen not to make public any of the locations that I explored. While the majority of people visit these places with respect, I’ve found that only a few individuals can damage and pillage an entire habitat in just a day. What I’ve come across too often are vast fields of rocks that have been flipped and not replaced, and the animals that live there pilfered.

: The colorful Long-nosed Snake

: Ground Snake

: Night Snake Juvenile

: Even this late in May this male Collared Lizard hasn’t emerged from his Winter burrow yet. I lowered his rock back down to let him sleep a little longer.

: Juvenile Eastern Collared-Lizard

: Triploid Checkered Whiptail

: Red-spotted Toad female

It wasn’t all about herps, May is prime time for wildflowers and bird watching. The prairie was exploding with bird songs with a vibrancy that I’m not used to hearing in many places. Most notable were Lark Bunting and the trills of many Hummingbirds. I even passed an enormous Golden Eagle with a kill that I wasn’t able to photograph. There were so many wildflowers in bloom that I could have spent the whole trip shooting species after species.

: A field of desert flowers

: Lavenderleaf Sundrops Flower

: Pentstemon

: Stanleya Prince’s Plume Plant

Being an abnormally moist Spring, the ground-dwelling arthropods who depend on a minimum level of humidity to breath were very prevalent under almost every rock.

: Colorado Tarantula

: Striped Bark Scorpion

: Black Widow Female

It took me 12 years living in Colorado to finally get my trophy shot of a Prairie Rattlesnake. I Encountered 2 on the same day. One rattler who I found slithering through tall grass chose to flee, and this one on an open road chose to coil up defensively.

: sdfsf

The geology in the southeast region of Colorado is mind-blowing. Almost every rock has some kind of fossil embedded in it, erosion revealed eons of Earth’s history in the sandstone, and there were Dinosaur tracks nearby. Too much to explore in less than 48 hours.