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Hadn't realized it had been so long since my last post (2007 ?) ..Jeff...you and your bride were about to have a baby...he or she must be 5 or 6 by now? ....about then I started to get serious about 1. returning to my long passion for photography 2. Getting over being a complaining wuss about...

Almost exactly a year ago I hiked along the old rail bed running NW(approx) from Upton Crossong ( near Asa Pittman's old cabin site) and came back with my black plastic garbage bag 1/3 full of obviously casually and thoughtlessly discarded detritus of so-called civilization. Dave

Guy's fortuitous photo of his GPS unit seem to be an unequivocal time-check to me! Sometimes the planets and stars do align just right, eh?

Size matters, and it's hard to tell... but the head shape sure looks vulpoid; I bet it's a fox with a bad case of Sarcoptic mange to me. Sarcoptes scabei is a commonly occuring ectoparasite of foxes that becomes especially prevalent when a local fox population is on the increase. Individuals...

Jes' f'r the record, that coelocanth was caught AND IDENTIFIED in '38; even I think that's a bit more than "...just a few years back..." My point is that the creature had probably come up in nets before that instance, but had just been considered some sort of trash fish. It wasn't until...

Several months (or a year-or-more ?)ago when I brought up this topic of "why no copperheads in the NJPBs?" there seemed to be no satisfactory answer. I mentioned that I'd never seen one when I was herping actively in the PBs in the 50s and 60s and just assumed they weren't s'posed t'be there...

I shall henceforth, whenever refering to the three-legged support for my camera - either orally or in print-, called it my "T.R. iPod." Oh... those periods? That space? And the idiosyncratic capitalizations?... just "typos" Dave

I'd be a bit sceptical about the possibility of the tracks being of an otter; the few confirmed otter tracks I've seen pretty uniformly showed five toes, sometimes with the "thumb" (inside toe, fore and aft) a bit smaller and more separated from the rest. This holds, as I recall, for the...

Wow! Haven't seen one in years. So beautiful. Thanks, Dave

Any luck? Dave

Sorry L.A.C.; I see you just went to Schwenksville for football camp, you didn't grow up there. Dave

Schwenksville, eh? Was my old friend Jim Hahn still on the faculty at the high school when you were there? Dave

Let's recognize that the terms "yellow phase" and "black phase" are two extremes of a fairly even gradation within a continuum. That continuum, however, is certainly not represented by a simple Gaussian curve; were that so, then most rattlers would be in the in-between range of collor and...

Believe in Bigfoot? The key word is "believe." John Locke said it well: "One cannot be reasoned out of an idea that one wasn't reasoned into." Dave

Hey, Sean, That was a both a heartfelt disquisition and great job to boot! The consummate verity and sense of your missive mitigates, however, not a whit my life-long frustration with sincere attempts to keep up-to-date with (in the 50s and 60s) herp systematics - and since then with bacterial...

herpetological falseoids (NOT factoids) Yee Gods; error upon error! The outer surface of snake skin IS made of the same stuff as that of human skin: however, that's keratin (not carotene - a precursor of vitamin A). And coral snakes are NOT found in New Jersey - although the scarlet...

Crap! I 'spose they changed ol' Natrix sipedon as well... (yeah, yeah ... I heard about "Nerodia"... have they screwed around with Desmognathus sp. yet?) Well anyway; lemme tellya'bout back in th'day... Dave

A wee tan frog? With "Brand X" on its back? Gotta be a "Peeper" (Hyla crucifer) If the stream was flowing, coulda been one of several. If the stream bed was only moist I'd bet on a dusky salamander (Desmognathus fuscus). Dave

Could well be a bobcat track by its general shape (four toes with a stubby cruciform pad), but even with the baseball cap, it's hard to gauge the size; next time use a coin or a fresh dollar bill for size comparison (can then be definitively measured in a photo). To the best of my recollection...

You betchum, Red Ryder! Dave (4XL)