The Good: meeting new folks ( to me ), meeting up with past folks, finding a large female lep.
The Bad: having a on-coming vehicle run over a huge and flawless female suboc.
The Ugly: some herpers trashing and stealing from a herp friemdly lodging facility.
More of the good: Having meeting up with Alabamians, Trey P. and his wonderful girfriend, Kim, with Justin from Alabama and Terry from Texas, we converged on West Texas to walk some property owned by Trey and herp observe in the Trans Pecos region of the Big Bend. While down with my wonderful wife Mary, we saw some interesting sights and animals in which one was a large female lepidus found approx. one mile east of Cantrabano Creek and movie set. Among other herp sightings were: atroxes, subocs, molossus, rhinos, hyps, elegans, affinis, numerous splendida and huge numbers of emoryi.
Of other herpers: met Brad A. ( sorry Brad about the confusing at the base of the Big Hill and " chivalry " is not dead folks because Brad helped 2 girls get back to Lajitas late one night when they CREAMED their vehicle by running over a boulder and putting a mojor hole in what seemed to be their tranny ), met up with past aquaintintances Tony, Pete W. from Cal. whom I had not seen for over 15 years, and Mike W. from Florida.
More of the Bad: One night while we had south 118 at the Xmas to ourselves, a rather large SUV was coming from the opposite direction and just as it was about to cross paths with my vehicle, lo and behold I saw a huge suboc in both our head lights.I tried to flash with light in hand the SUV that this snake was on road but they just kept coming and nailed it ! After I retrieved the snake I saw it was a beautiful female and flawless.
More of the Ugly: The owners of a famous motel/cabins down in the Bend region are going the way of being discourage of letting herpers stay there because of linen thefts, rats left in freezers, not turning off air conditioning when checking out, not checking out when they are suppose to and or not wanting to pay that " extra day " when they don't, leaving water running ( a BIG comodity of the Big Bend area ), letting other people stay without paying, etc. I for one, hope this DOES NOT discourage them on letting us stay there. It is one of the last " herp friendly " places to stay in that area. Also the lady that cleans these rooms works fairly hard to put up with us and a TIP wouldn't be out of the question for her for the mess that we herpers leave.
Now an interesting note: this was my 49th trip down there and I had never seen or heard of so many sightings of emoryi and splendida before in one trip. Of the 5 nights that we were there, 20 or so emoryi and about a dozen splendida.
Totals observed by us:
16 atrox
3 molossus
1 lep
6 rhinocheilus
7 emoryi
2 splendida
5 suboc
17 hypsiglena
2 elegans ( I swear one was Texas the other Kansas )
2 affinas ( could of been sayi but looked gopher to me )
1 ground snake specie
Weather and conditions went from hot to cool , dry to rain, rain in surrounding area, most nights rather windy.
Chambo
