Has anyone here going herping in Thailand or Southeast Asia? Can anyone recommend good books, websites, or share their own experiences?
There is a photographic guide to the reptiles of SE Asia that might be helpful. It is pretty cheap and available from Amazon.com.
I'd like to spend a couple days hiking and looking for herps to photograph as well....Supposedly in the area where I will be, there is a coastal national park with 125 sq. miles of land, much of it mangrove habitat. I would love to find one of those black and yellow mangrove snakes or some water monitors! Or maybe a reticulated python!
Most of my experience herping in SEA has been in Indonesia, primarily east Kalimantan. My experience has been that herping is tough in SE Asia due to habitat destruction and harvesting of snakes for food and skin.
Mangroves are pretty good herping because they are hard to hunt for food/skins. I found mangroves pretty snakey, but hard to herp. In the water you might find Achrocordus (by snorkeling) and the trees have Dryophis and potentially Boiga (I never found Boiga myself). Cerberus rhynchops was pretty common in the mangroves in Bali.
Water monitors are really abundant in and around mangroves in Indonesia. I don't know about Thailand, but if they are anywhere near as common, they will be hard to miss.
I already know there are king cobras in the mountains (although I seriously doubt I will run across one of these bad boys), and a variety of other vipers and cobras live in the country. Russell's vipers? Common cobras?
I think King Cobras don't do very well in areas with a lot of people, but I don't know what your chances are of finding them. As for common cobras, they are pretty common snakes that tolerate human disruption well, but they are so widely eaten in Thailand that they might be hard to find.
Apparently, some of the Trimersurus vipers are pretty common. You might check among the mangrove tangles for them.
Other of the more common taxa are Treesnakes (Dryophis) and Bronzebacks (Dendrelaphis). I have found them by looking carefully in clumps of vines.
Try hunting around padi fields if there are any there. They are really snakey areas (as well as having water monitors). I found that road hunting/walking in padis at night was a good way to find things like kraits and Xenopeltis.
The other thing I am thinking about is the season. In southern Thailand, it is pretty much warm year round, but I will be visiting in the dry season. When I studied tropical ecology in northeastern Australia, I quickly learned that the herping is not nearly as good in the cooler (but still warm) dry season as it is during the steaming hot wet season. So I'm wondering how much success I might have in Thailand during December and how I should focus my efforts.
I have heard people say they prefer the dry season, not because animals are most active, but because the relatively open understory makes snakes easier to find and they tend to be concentrated around water sources.
Also, go into this with reasonable expectations. The old adage of 1 snake per day in tropical forests applies - if you find an average of a snake per day, you are doing good. Seasnakes can be easier to find, particularly at night.
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Chris Harrison
Central Texas
