How do all of the snake fans find this site? Google? Or do people talk about it on other boards?
The New Jersey Pine Barrens are legend among professional and amateur herpetologists - and especially those from the northeast - because for a herpetophile the Pines mimic the environment of the southeastern coastal plain forests - lacking only palmetto. Many herp of the southeast reach the northern extreme of their contiguous range in North Carolina or Dismal swamp in southern VA - and then appera again in this fascinating, separate, circumscribed environment in south Jersey known as the Pine Barrens.
No 'gators, ,mocassins, or coral snakes, but it's interesting that a coral snake mimic, the scarlet snake, persists (or did persist within recent living memory) in the Pines. Also, as I think I've mentioned elsewhere, the Pine Barrens version of the light-phase timber rattler is closer in appearance to the canebrake rattler ( a race of the timber rattler) of the southeast than it is to light-phase timbers elsewhere in the northeast.
I'm in no way a botanist, but my botanist friends are just as enthusuastic about the Pine Barrens as are the herpetologists - and for similar reasons.
Wild cotton, prickly pear cactus, carnivorous plants, orchids - whoodathunkit?
Where the hell is this? New Jersey? "NO WAY" they say...
Yessir; the Pine Barrens are "little bit of the Southland" up here in the north!
Dave