Salut!

Voici une photo d'un Eastern Hognose, ou couleuvre à nez plat en français, que j'ai trouvé en fin de semaine passé en Ontario malgré la mauvaise température.



Il y a eu plusieurs autres découvertes intéressantes et je devrais pouvoir mettre les photos bientôt.

Malade Nic, elle est super belle!

Un autre check sur ta liste!

Belle découverte félicitation Nir ^^

Wow ! Félicitation Superbe espèce en plus..

Dans quel coin de l'Ontario as-tu fait cette belle découverte ?

diadophis a écrit:

Very nice Nic, je suis vraiment content pour toi !!!

Si t'as d'autres photos, ce serait vraiment cool... p-e avec une p'tite histoire tant qu'à y être !!!

Voici donc plus de photos! C'est un copie coller d'un post écris en anglais. Je n'ai pas le temps de traduire, je vous laisse la narration en anglais tout de même...

Just like last year, I met with my friends from Ontario in the Geogian Bay area for some ''miraculous'' herping! The spot where we go is probably one of the best places for herps in Canada... Lots of species, an abundance of specimens, some unusual surprises once in a while, fun to herp habitats, plus it is an absolutely gorgeous place!

The only thing that we didn't predict was how shitty the weather was gonna be... Indeed!! We got like 5 inches of rain in 3 days and the temps didn't go above 59 F the whole weekend... We might have gotten a good one hour of sun total...

Despite all that, we got some pretty awesome and very surprising results...

We arrived friday morning under the rain... Good thing the camp site there as some type of pavillion.... We moved the picnic tables around and installed our tents in a semi dry place... We then decided that the rain was not about to ruin our herping, so we decided to start hiking the trails to see what we might find.

It didn't take very long to find a little pond that I knew would give our first species… Sure enough I quickly located two little four toed salamanders hidden in a sphagnum bed! A species that I really like, but rarely see.






After getting some good shots of these little guys, we pressed on and soon arrived in this habitat.



I tell you, our hopes for any kind of snakes were pretty low… But Ryan surprised us… a lot… he flipped a huge rock and discovered a lovely yearling eastern hognose snake!!! Definitely one of the most exciting species in the spot! And a baby to boot! We were not expecting that!




We then found a brown snake and a ringneck snake followed by another pretty cool find! Dan flipped this yearling eastern foxsnake under a flat rock just 3 feet from the lake.





What a day… rain, cold, no sun… and already 4 species of snake…

After dinner, things were pretty slow and weather got worse… We decided to get into dry clothes, drink beer and play texas hold em… With chips… Yeah… real chips… I had some delicious Miss Vickie’s Lime & Black Pepper kettle cooked chips (high class)! Ryan had chipotle spicy doritos (not bad, not bad). Dan had pizza-flavoured pringles (weird, but… kind of tasty)… and Dan #2 had brought… plantain chips…(the healthy stuff!!) No need to say he was required to put more chips in the pot to balance our quality stuff!



Saturday morning, things looked much better!! The sky was cloudy but once in a while, you could see blue sky!! Encouraging if you ask me! But… it was freakin’ cold!! Like 50 F!

It took a while before we found our first snake! But the first, again by Ryan, was a nice find. Ribbon snakes are not often seen in this particular place! So this was a worthy find! And it was a nice looking specimen!




After the ribbon, we got nothing worth mentioning for a while.

Coming back to camp for dinner, we surprised this nice female common snapping turtle on the beach probably looking for a place to lay! She was very cooperative, not aggressive at all, and we didn’t bother her for too long.





After dinner, Ryan and Dan #2 decided to try fishing and me and Dan #1 decided to take advantage of the few sunrays that were breaking to look for eastern Massassaugas. Turns out we had a good idea!!

We saw two individuals about 6 feet apart. Can you spot him?






We soon found a third individual sunning amongst a dead juniper bush. See it?




Three massassaugas in 20 minutes! We decided to go get the other guys so they didn’t miss all the fun… Turns out, we found a fourth specimen pretty quickly after joining with the others, and that was it for massassaugas for the weekend. All of them were in shed and we didn’t bother to try for good photographs…



After that, Ryand and Dan were itching to find turtles!! So we decided to stick close to the water to let them search for turtles… Close to the water is also very good for any snake. Sure enough, Ryan found this adult eastern hognose that was ‘’sunning’’. We took a few shots and let him be… We didn’t even need to move or pose him! That was cool… I love it when you get good shots without disturbing the animals too much.





After that snake, I decided to help my fellow turtle aficionados in their quest. Our main targets were stinkpots and blanding’s. I decided to try walking barefoot in weed beds. Told myself, if there is a turtle here, I’ll step on it… Sure enough, a few minutes later, I was lucky enough to touch the carapace of a blanding’s turtle! I was happy! You don’t see this species up close very often. Beautiful little girl!!



After finding the blanding, we really wanted to find a stinkpot!! It would have been a lifer for me and Ryan! We found a very nice little marsh next to the lake (perfect you would think) where another herper friend had found a stinkpot before… Well, we only found this nice and huge watersnake of which I managed to get a nice in situ shot!



The rest of the day was pretty much herpless…

On Sunday morning, the rain was bad!! Lots of rain!!!



Well, might as well do with what we got… So we thought salamander time! In a few minutes we found more four toeds, a nice little spotted salamander, a few red backs and some red efts… We decided to do a salamander shoot. The results are pretty cool I think!










We also tried for stinkpots again, but we got skunked on those… and went home stinkpotless! Would have been my only lifer!

Left the place after that! Good weekend!

Weekend after that, had some friends come to place for some outdoor fun. I took them to a nice little spot close to home that is THE place in Québec for herp diversity. Well, the weekend sucked for herps but we still had a lot of fun.

In situ leopard frog



In situ watersnake (was a lifer for my friends, so I was happy they got to see at least this species)



A cool find while looking for snakes was this black-billed cuckoo sitting on three huge and blue eggs! Black billed cuckoos are not very common up here, so seeing one on a nest was very cool. A cool angle gave us a good opportunity to get photos without getting close!




And after that, we turned ourselves toward fishing… Bass and pike were plenty!



Dom thought it was a good idea to slap Jo in the face with the fish tail…







Jo was not of the same advice…hehe

Eventually everyone caught fish and everyone was happy!



Thanks for looking! Hopefully more Canadian stuff coming soon! hehe

Vraiment cool! J'aimerais ça voir toutes les espèces de serpents du Québec et d'Ontario, à date j'en ai vu 3, c'est déjà ça!
Les photos sont vraiment belles aussi! Est-ce qu'elles sont HD?

(pis moi aussi jveux un achigan bon.)

J'ai vu tes photos sur facebook et vous avez fait de belles découvertes malgré la température

Vraiment cool les juvéniles (hognose et fox snake) et la Blanding !

Belles photos en pasant

Marc Dubois a écrit:

J'ai vu tes photos sur facebook et vous avez fait de belles découvertes malgré la température

Vraiment cool les juvéniles (hognose et fox snake) et la Blanding !

Belles photos en pasant