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Sauntering through the Sandhills

Jefferson

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Well, it's that time of the year again: February. When I lived in Michigan, it was the most miserable month of the year, the month where spring started to seem tantalizingly close but the anticipation of new herping, new birds, new life made every single day get longer. Now that I'm in Virginia, February has some hope. Sometimes it's warm enough to herp right here, and if it's not, it's a short four-hour drive down into some of the most biodiverse herp country in North America: the Sandhills.

So it was that this Tuesday, the 21st, I loaded up the herp mobile and chugged southeast across the mountains, bound for North Carolina's verdant sandhills to get a few lifers and see a good friend, Bethany. Upon arriving at my destination, an RV Campground, I met my friend and we met our host at the campground, a woman who owns and regularly fires AR-15s, socializes with the local Lumbee Indians, and is a religious independent. She's an American original to be sure, like Charles Lindbergh, the Oreo Pizza, and atomic warheads. After we searched a lakeside finding only cricket frogs and masses of amphibian eggs for a few hours, the owner took us out on her golf cart to give us a tour of the property. In so doing, we happened upon a seep so muddy and slow that it looked like moving chocolate cake. Luckily, the seep had some cover in it, old plywood boards that used to be golf cart bridges. Under these, we saw two salamanders: an Eastern Mud Sally and an Atlantic Coast Slimy, both lifers for Bethany, and both of which I needed better pictures of anyhow. After that, we rounded out the herping day by setting some minnow traps in the ponds and lakes of the campground, baited with shrimp and glow sticks. Side note: herpers are the only people on earth who would try to bait something inedible into a trap with some of the most expensive seafood!!

The next morning, as the dew evaporated off pine straw and turkey oak leaves, we started by checking our traps, which had turned up nothing over night and then proceeded to some public land, where we started with a small Sandhills pond so clear it looked like a stationary mountain stream, the bottom lined with assorted oak leaves. While I flipped logs around the edge, Bethany dip-netted, and before long, called out, "Got ONE!!" It was a Broken-striped Newt, the most important target species of the trip for me. Before leaving the pond, we had found three more of these red-lined beauties, the last one appreciably larger than the first three. After that, we checked some tin for snakes, but there were none to be had despite the unseasonably high temperatures, only a few Little Brown skinks. Then, we ventured north to a park reputed to have Sandhills Eurycea, Dwarf Waterdogs, and a few snakes, but found only another Slimy and some skinks beside a switch cane seep. After discussing trap designs with a gregarious naturalist, we set a few new ones on a different part of the RV camp owner's property, this area a bottomland swamp, which rounded out the day's herping.

Day three started with another check of the traps, again empty, before we ventured west toward where the Sandhills and Piedmont meet. We walked along a small lake looking for turtles and checking the Brussel sprout-odored seeps for Eurycea, with no luck on the salamander front but spotting multiple Yellow-bellied Sliders along the trail. We also spotted some Cricket frogs in the seeps and skinks along the trailside. With that, we broke for a fish hatchery supposed to have Cottonmouths, but no such luck. We did find a young slider in the hatchery's channel and I passed through a southern right of passage when I accidentally sat down on a fire ant nest to photograph the turtle...ouch! Besides a fishing spider big enough to take down a toad, this spot yielded nothing else and we went to lunch with one last shot at snakes to come, which yielded nothing once again.

The next morning, we checked out of the campground and retrieved all our traps, one of which had finally caught something: a Carpenter Frog an asparagus-green frog with handsome tawny stripes on the sides, a lifer for both of us. With this, we headed across the South Carolina border bound for our last spot, stopping at the Doghouse Diner in Hartsville on the way to get a taste of the Deep South. Our last stop yielded a few cricket frogs with bright red stripes but no salamanders, as most of the seeps were dry. With that, the trip was over herping-wise, and I drove back to Virginia with 3 lifers bagged: Carpenter Frog, Newt, and Little Brown Skink. Not a bad way to start the year! Happy herpin' y'all!

Jefferson
 

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Jefferson

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Thanks for the kind words Sith! It sure was a blast down there in the Tar-Heel State. The newts are Broken-striped newts, though, a subspecies of Eastern Newt. The fully "Striped Newt" is much rarer and is only found in North Florida and South Georgia to my knowledge. Happy new herping year to you!
Jefferson
 

Cloppy

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Jan 7, 2017
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Georgia
Is that a ground skink? I look for those all the time in Georgia.
 

Biev

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That's one blissful-looking turtle! Kinda makes me want to be her right now...
 
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