Fragments From Floyd

At last, some stamps for the everyday man-on-the-street herpetologist to love. When the postmaster laid out a half dozen choices of stamps on the counter, I hesitated only about as long as it takes a gray rat snake to flick its forked tongue to decide. "Give me the herptiles!" I said. "The who?" retorted the clerk. "Oh I'm a snake man from way back. Almost had to annul my marriage during its second week because of a snake" I said. I didn't go into my snake tales that I recorded here last year.

Scarlet King Snake: innocuous, but very like the deadly coral snake. Just remember--Red on Black, Friend of Jack. Red on Yeller, kill a feller. And a word of advice: never carry a coral snake in a pillow case with a hole in it. The guy who was carrying it was in the front of the line as we hiked along a sandy trail in the Florida panhandle. Never did know when it came outta that sack. And I was at the end of that line.

I have never seen the Blue Spotted Salamander, which apparently lives NORTH of here. But one of my first herpeto-memories is of turning logs in an Alabama swamp looking for marble and spotted salamanders, which are also Plethodontid (lungless) salamanders, and some of the most beautiful creatures I've ever seen. Alas, our amphibians as a whole are not well and the lungless salamanders that depend on healthy forest microhabitat are in peril in many places. My grandchildren may never see what I have seen in branches, bogs and under bark.

As reptiles go, those of us from the deep south are deprived of much exposure to lizards, at least compared to those in more western areas. Skinks, anoles, and fence swifts was about the sum of it where I grew up. Willing to bet none of you have seen this creature. It is a southern lizard without legs that looks like a snake. HINT: It can blink. Snakes can't. To which the average person replies: I'll not be getting close enough to have the darned thing wink at me!"

Frog nostalgia: I am wading in a south Alabama bog, or swimming--depending on the depth of the water and the amount of support from the bottom muck. It is a warm, dark night before a rainstorm. Around me and my buddies are perhaps a thousand frogs of seven species, all shouting out their buzzy, booming, chirping, whirring, croaking advertisements to the females. Every now and then in the cacophony: a release call. A male had mistakenly clasped onto another male. I can smell the wet night, the organic soup of the bog, and the pervasive frogginess. We must have been crazy. But it was a good crazy.

Box turtles. How many have we rescued from one country road or another, especially when the kids were little. Our dog, Zachary, used to think of them as crunchy snacks. There was one on our first farm that had the initials "H C" carved into its shell. "Oh yeah", said the neighbors. That'da been Herbert Catron. He lived in the house you live in back in the sixties. Died in '65". So, that turtle had been around the block a time or two. We found him at least once a year for the six years we lived there. I like to think he is somewhere up on those hillsides still today.