shreyes's Favorites

LIFER! literally no words, this has to be the rarest snake in the piedmont of North Carolina. Yep! This sighting was in the piedmont of NC! went herping with a buddy, hiked many long hours inside a huge marsh/swamp habitat, not a single snake. We reached the edge of an agricultural field with a nice slow water marsh, and we found this mudsnake at the surface of the water just chilling near the base of a half submerged fallen tree.

this is not what I expected to find at all, not only that but this snake was massive! 3+ feet. I would have never guessed to have found a mudsnake today and a true “lemon head”.

This snake proved to be the hardest to photograph I’ve ever encountered! They cannot sit still and any cover placed on them they will push until it is moved. I also noticed an unusual defense mechanism where this snake used its tails to move as if the tail was its head. Its head sat still while the tail “creeped” around the ground imitating a snake searching the ground/water. I’m not sure if they are known to do this, either way I am super happy with only one snake this week and it’s the rarest around here!

Lifer! And first tricolor! I knew I could get one this year but I thought for sure it would be cruising in Big Cypress or Flamingo not flipped in my yard. It was absolutely unreal flipping my board and finally after two years seeing this thing. Nice aberrant head band too. Subadult (13"). Last two pics are a habitat shot and a pic of it drinking after the photo session, which I thought was kinda cool. Twitched and mock-struck kinda like a kingsnake which I did not know they did, and it actually bit once which I have never heard of a scarlet doing.

This King Cobra snake came into a residential area of Kanchili, Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh. This picture was taken by my close friend Bhargavi. I thought i could make an observation and asked her permission to upload on inat. Bhargavi was over there when this snake came. It was during the Covid 19 pandemic times.This snake was captured by a local snake catcher and was released in forests.

This is the most colorful Western Fence Lizard I have ever seen. Scrolling through online photos on Californiaherps.com and other sites I see there are examples of this coloration out there, but they’re few and far between.

(Larger, darker snake) My mom texted me a photo of two snakes she found hanging out together while she was watering plants. ~3.5 hours later, they were still in the same area and I took some more photos. Sometimes the larger snake would move away a foot or two, and eventually the smaller one would slither over to it again. (will create a duplicate post for the other snake)

Lifer! Legit like the fourth snake of the year, I haven't gotten out at all this month. I haven't even seen a racer at my house before this guy lol! While I'm photographing some lunatic walks by and starts ranting (with plenty of obscenities and cussing thrown in because why not) about respecting nature and that she's gonna report me. I was making sure to keep the encounter legal, so she had no grounds for anything. She was pretty sus, fun experience. I don't recall now if it was exactly at the moment or a bit before, but I was just telling my brother that I didn't expect much quality because of how late it was, but we should still be able to find some racers. Nope! One and only snake, and pretty much the only herp asides from a gator or two and as many anoles. It was stretched out on the grass and I knew what I had to be looking at. Writhed a bit and then posed for a few minutes. It was insane. Pretty cool out like 68 or seventy-even and cloudy, with decent humidity for the dry season and light rain just a few minutes before. Looking back it was probably pretty good weather for muds. It was pretty awesome especially considering I was only expecting a few starved racers. I don’t usually fave my own observations but I’m pretty stoked about this one.

This has got to be the most morbid thing that I have ever found in nature that I photographed. A deer that had its stomach opened up and was being eaten by magpies while still alive. This was something that I just never saw on any of my frequent trips to Yellowstone NP when I was younger. It was very unsettling.

melanistic

interesting article from the Wilson Bulletin from 1965 about a melanistic Pileated Woodpecker at Okefenokee in 1917:
https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/wilson/v077n04/p0404-p0405.pdf

This leucistic individual is Salamander C. This one has been photographed and observed since 2010 many times by Don Scallen and it had at least been alive two years before that, making it thirteen years old- two years older then me!

Watched this great blue heron from a distance, with beautiful plumage, fishing in deep water up to its belly. It caught a very large fish, brought it to shore, swallowed it over a period of 10 seconds or so. Once the heron re-entered the water a few feet from shore, it began to croak/grunt and stab its beak towards something in the water. After only a few stabs, the heron was unable to move, the bobcat emerged from the water and brought it to shore, with the heron grunting often. Before the heron was even dead, the bobcat began carrying it back out towards the tree line, having a difficult time walking due to the size of the bird. From the first photo to the last, it was only a minute.

Still dont know why it happened but while out birding this Sharpie landed on my head! Scared me at first and then amazingly it let me take selfies with it! Had no idea what it was until I started taking pics I was expecting a magpie not a hawk!

been trying to figure out where this bird was for two years... persistence, a hunch and a tip put this one on my life list after I shed a few tears, did a jig, and gave out a loud yelp later in the day