A Trip to the Sunshine State - Part 1

It's been a while since my trip to Florida but I figured making a post about it now is better than never. It would be extremely long if I wrote about it so I will mostly just post the pictures.

Back in December my friend Taylor and I went on a road trip down to the sunshine state. We had our route planned out and our target species in mind. Leaving early in the morning we had a 24 hour drive ahead of us. 

After 12 hours we made a stop in the North Carolina Sandhills at night in attempt to find an Eastern Tiger Salamander. We met up with friends from the area and went out into the dark forest.

Unfortunately, the weather hadn't been right and the area was too dry so no Tigers were turned up. We did however find a few lifers:

Broken-striped Newt

Carpenter Frog
After a few hours in the Sandhills, we continued on our way to Central Florida to search the Xeric habitat for snakes.

On our first night in Central Florida we found several lifers, with my favorite being a Yellow Ratsnake!

Banded Watersnake

Yellow Ratsnake
Southern Toad



Pig Frog

Brown Anole

Green Treefrog -juvenile

House Gecko
The following day we went out in search of our main target of the trip, the Eastern Indigo Snake. Although we didn't turn one up we found a few other species.

Southern Five-lined Skink

Southern Black Racer - juvenile

Southern Black Racer - adult

Florida Scrub Lizard
These were all awesome finds, but my highlight of the day was definitely this Eastern Coachwhip.

Eastern Coachwhip



Eastern Coachwhip

Eastern Coachwhip
I had to dive into a cactus in order to catch this snake! I won't be doing that again but it was worth it for my lifer... maybe.

Later that night we went back out for some night herping and found some more frogs.


Green Treefrog - adult

Pinewoods Treefrog

Squirrel Treefrog
Greenhouse Frog
We also found another Banded Watersnake and my first wild American Alligator on our way back to our campsite.

Banded Watersnake


American Alligator
And this was just the beginning! We had the better part of a week left to herp Central and South Florida.



R. Wolfe

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