woodjin said:
I've never seen one in the pines. I saw one once in monmouth county growing up. Neat!!
Jeff
It is strange to hear that hognose snakes are now considered ... unusual. Although never what I'd have called "common" forty years to fifty years ago they were not really all that unusual. The species will, in captivity, feed on a wide variety of small vertebrates - cold- and warm-blooded. (toads, frogs, salamanders, and small mice). But in the natural state their populations seem dependant upon a healthy toad population. Where toads were scarse, so were hognoseds. Where toads were more plentiful, so were the hoggies. Has there been a significant drop in the toad population in the pines? There used to be a healthy toad population around Lakehurst, and the hoggies followed suite. Same near a swampy area down near Friendship-Stillwell. Also near the Wading River cranbogs.
I recall some comments earlier in the summer about a big hatch of toads, but I suppose that could have been an unusual local phenomenon. I hope not.
On that same trip I mentioned earler where I found a bunch of hatchlings, a few days before in the same area I'd caught a gravid Hoggie. I took her back to Penn State with me where she laid 18 eggs. They were incubated in moist, torn-up newspaper in a crock kept near a steampipe in my advisor's office. Dr Penoyer F. English was a great advisor! Fifteen hatched and all survived; one was melanistic. Got them eating pink mice by rubbing them (the mice) with toad urine; after they'd accepted a few, the toad smell became unnecessary. In those days it was accepted that if one was going to keep hoggies, one had to keep a supply of toads as well. The next spring ('58) the dam and her offspring were returned, marked, and released where she'd been caught.
Dave
