Sunkhaze National Wildlife Refuge 2

As the not-so-exciting and very cold night came to an end, our second morning at Sunkhaze was spent canoeing on Pickerel Pond to find eastern painted turtles. They were abundant among logs and on the shore, basking in the sun. My canoe partner and I managed to catch four, but we decided to spend most of the time just observing. 

The males could be discerned from females based on their large claws and space between the end of the shell and the cloaca, which is lacking on females. Male turtles often have a more concave plastron, too, in order to sit easier on the female when engaging in fertilization, but it's not always obvious on aquatic turtles. The young ones were too small to discern a sex. 

In the afternoon, before heading back to campus, we tried again to look for snakes. We went to some large open areas with thick grass and fallen trees. I saw one garter snake but wasn't able to catch it. We did find a small snapping turtle at the water area we had gone to the previous night to find frogs. A mink frog was also found, pictured below. It is often confused with the green frog but emits a musky, mink smell when handled.  

As we left Sunkhaze and headed back to COA, we stopped at Hamilton Pond to check out some traps we had set for snapping turtles. We had managed to capture two, one male and one female. They were obviously angry and pretty large but not at their full size. The defense for the snapping turtle on land is to live up to its name. They can extend their neck quite far and have very powerful jaws. When they're disturbed in water, they usually make the attempt to run away first, but they're more vicious on land because of the vulnerability. 

Our trip quickly came to an end, and I decided it had been one of the best field trips since starting at COA.

Sunkhaze National Wildlife Refuge 1

On the weekend of May 18th and 19th, my herpetology class took a trip to Sunkhaze National Wildlife Refuge. We spent the night at a camping area nearby. Upon first arriving at the camping area, we were greeted by many eastern newts in the pond at the site. They were quite cute and proved fairly easy to collect once they were found. I didn't actually catch any, but I didn't mind. 

Once we had dropped off our belongings, we traveled to the refuge and spent the first part of the afternoon hunting for frogs. And we found many! There were green frogs, pickerel frogs, leopard frogs, and some wood frogs. I am not sure which frog is in the first photo below, but the second one shows a pickerel frog, which is similar in appearance to the northern leopard frog. The pickerel frog is more apt to have two organized rows of squarish spots, however. The third photo is that of a green frog with blue coloration. The bucket in the next picture is full of green frogs, while another green frog is pictured chilling in a pond and being held. It's ideal to hold a frog from their hind legs to prevent harming their soft bodies and to keep them from attempting to jump away. 

We spent the rest of the afternoon attempting to find snakes but only came across one eastern garter snake, which I did not get a good photo of. We left the area to return back to the camp area and spent the early evening relaxing before going out again that night to find more frogs. During the night outing, we found more green frogs and many bullfrogs. The frog in the picture below is a large male bullfrog, which can be discerned from the yellow throat and the large tympanum behind the eye. To tell the difference between green frogs and bullfrogs, you need to observe the dorso-lateral folds along the back, leading down from the eye. It continues almost completely down the length of a green frog while stopping short and curving behind the tympanum of a bullfrog. 

That outing ended the first day and led way to a very cold night spent in sleeping bags that did not offer hardly any warmth.