Hi All,
I had the great pleasure of playing host to some of the main milkheads of this forum & country & it truely was a great weekend & week to show them the kingsnakes & milksnakes of Southeastern & Northeastern Kansas in their peak activity season habitats. Having had a email from Cole weeks before, he had asked if I would have time to show the gang some places to herp & with a better & more normal Kansas spring & rains than what we had in 2011, I knew this would be great timing to complete "bucket lists" of things these men wanted to find & we did just that. Saturday produced 6 Speckled kingssnakes & 3 Prairie kingsnakes from my home county of Wilson here. After a great lunch with their house host Cody of Fall River, we all headed into a site Mike & I knew of in Elk county & within minutes of getting onto the outcrop, Dell found a syspila, then minutes later, we heard Dave yell out "milk"! & we all went over to see him holding his first ever sypsila like Dell had just done. Awhile later, Dave scores another syspila, before we moved down the road to another outcrop. After leaving Elk county in late afternoon, we had amassed 3 Red Milksnakes & 2 Speckled kingsnakes there, plus plenty of other snakes...
Heres Dells 23"+ syspila he scored in Elk county:
Heres a shot of the rock where Dell scored his snake, left to right, Jeff,Dell(in background), Cole & Mike & a look at the habitat for syspila there:
Heres a Elk county Flat Headed snake, we found several of these small snakes in both counties this day:
The next 3 shots are immediately after Dave scored that first sub-adult bright syspila, with btw, was his first wild-found one, Cole congrats him in first photo, then Jeff does, then his smile says it all....I love smiles like that..
Here s shot of Dave, as he is working his way thru the syspila habitat in Elk county that day. BTW, collecting conditions were IMHO perfect, total cloud cover all day long, 65-66F, with steady N winds 5-15mph, it just couldnt have been any better!:
The NEXT day, at Perry Lake, Jefferson county, KS, within minutes after arrivving there, Cole loses his syspilian virginity, LOL and finds a bright red juvenile red milk, here he is holding it, Dell searching in the background, with a good shot of the habitat the snake was found in, defined in most accounts as "Woodland Edge".:
Heres another shot I took of Dells monster size gravid female syspila that he found at another stop we made at Perry that day, I am thinking she was at least 27-28"+ long. Then a pic of Dell holding her:
And a "In-Situ" shot of a enormous sized Red-Sided Garter snake, 36"+, that Dell turned from under a rock later that day at Perry Lake, Dell said it was the biggest garter snake he had ever seen:
Dave had a flight to catch at KS City this day, and we headed for home, stopping in Topeka & feasted at a KS Fast Food Burger chain called "Spangles", which is a favorite gut-loader for most fast food connosoirs where availiable in selected KS cities. I will post more photos soon, including a Youtube video or two that I made that weekend. later, John F.
