… a couple pictures from a recent trip that failed to produce my target species, but provided some nice practice with my HDR technique.

hdr-prescott-forest

hdr-skull-valley-1

 Share

Being out in the wildnerness looking for snakes puts a person in a lot of attractive surrounding, and every trip comes with a story. Here are a few HDR (and non HDR) pictures taken in-between snakes.

HDR Picture in S.E. Arizona

HDR Picture of Santa Cruz County

HDR Picture in Arizona

Praying Mantis

This one is (we believe) an impromptu grave. It was found just 3 or 4 miles North of the Mexican border in a very high-activity area. Someone not making the trip is something that happens from time to time. The picture does not show it well, but it’s a rectangular pile about 6 feet long and 3 feet across, and the only pile of rocks in the area.

grave

 Share

Here’s my second-ever Speckled Rattlesnake (Crotalus mitchellii) I’ve ever found. The somewhat surreal look to the pictures is due to a compositing technique known as HDR, which are becoming quite popular these days. Fortunately for me, a goo 90% of the HDR pictures out there are of old barns or graphiti, so at least I’m doing something unique.

Speckled Rattlesnake

Speckled Rattlesnake (closer)

 Share

… continued from parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Here are some more pictures from the drive back to Arizona.

Cloudcroft, New Mexico

Near Silver City, New Mexico

HDR Photo in New Mexico

That night we stayed just inside New Mexico, and spent a few hours along the border.

sunset

… when herps are few, you’ll get scenery pictures.

In the night, we found a couple toads … a Great Plains Toad (Anaxyrus cognatus) and a male Couch’s Spadefoot Toad (Scaphiopus couchii):

Great Plains Toad

Couch\'s Spadefoot (male)

The amount of bugs flying all around us was just unreasonable at this point. There are usually a lot of creepy things flying around my head out there, attracted to the head lamp, but this night was just ridiculous. I was pulling crawling things out of my hair a full hour after getting back in the truck for the last time.

Anyway, that being said, here’s a little longnose snake we found who was as annoyed to be found as we were by the bugs we had to endure to get a picture. He wasn’t cooperative, and neither were we. This is the best we could do:

Long Nosed Snake

In the morning, I got up early to do a little hiking and see if anything was awake. I found a snake pretty quickly. It was a young Sonoran Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer affinis) of the usual high-pink color I usually find on this side of state.

He wasn’t happy about being woken up.

Sonoran Gophersnake

I spent some time hiking and didn’t find anything else, but it was hard to be disappointed.

Chiricuahua Mountains

Chiricuahua Mountains

I’ll end this series the same way our trip ended. While driving back to the hotel to get Kelly up and go home, I found the writhing body of a Mojave Rattlesnake. Both head and tail had been removed while the animal was still alive. Blood was splattered all around. This happened within minutes of my arrival.

Everything\'s Dumber in Texas

This is the kind of macho bullshit perpetuated by the idiots of Sweetwater Texas in their yearly redneck festival, where hundreds of dusty people too arrogant to realize they’re internationally recognized as personified ignorance gather to see who has the biggest hat. Of course this was not in Texas, but Rodeo, New Mexico.

It’s very hard to spend so much time with these animals and not become absolutely furious when finding something like this. This is, to me, similar to how most would feel if they found a dog in the street missing its head, somehow still moving. This was in my thoughts for days. I’m not kidding when I say I hope that the severed head got off one last bite. Sad to say these were my thoughts … but I guess I don’t prefer to be out in the desert whenever I can because I like people.

… and if any residents of Sweetwater end up on this site due to some Googling … please, please, please … buy your kids a book or two, and make Wednesday “No Beating!” day.

 Share

… continued from parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

We went for a short hike along the Delaware River in the afternoon. Temperatures were a little too hot to see much other than some whiptails. I did get some pictures of a softshell turtle. It was my first, so I was quite satisfied with this being the only notable animal of the trip.

First, a picture of what is probably a dinner-plate sized painted turtle making its way across the river.

Painted Turtle

Here’s a large spider making friends with a damselfly.

Best Pals

Another spider hanging out in the grass … this one a little more pointy than the other.

Potential Afternoon-Ruinner

The soft shelled turtle:

Spiny Softshelled Turtle

Here’s an HDR picture of evening clouds moving in from the South.

Standing in a big shadow

After watching the bat flight from the caverns, we went out again. Pretty quickly, we found the second of the really interesting diamondbacks on the trip. A big chocolate-brown Western Diamondback Rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox).

Crotalus atrox

A young male tarantula out and about:

Tarantula

… and last for the night, a Red-Spotted Toad (Anaxyrus punctatus).

 Share

Superstition Mountains, Arizona

 Share

Taken today in Yavapai Co., Arizona.

hdr-cent-sculpturatus-041208

 Share

Things have cooled off a little so we haven’t seen much in the last week or two. We found ourselves out there on Saturday after a likewise bunk fishing trip and saw nothing but maybe 5-6 dead Coachwhips (Masticophis flagellum), a Mojave (Crotalus scutulatus) that we watched get hit by a car as we waited, and a nice longnose snake (first of the year). I got some decent pictures on my old camera and was surprised the next day to see they’d all disappeared from the card somehow.

We went for a little hike West of Phoenix today and found only one snake. It was nice to get out regardless. Temps were down to 71 or so already at 6pm, so we were surprised to even find what we did.

Pretty place:

arizona upland desert scrub

A little HDR:

hrd-road

Arizona Upland Desert Scrub

On the way home we found a baby Mojave Rattlesnake crossing the road. It was only about 70F out, so it was kind of a surprise.

c-scutulatus1-041008

My girlfriend Kelly has a few pictures of that longnose on her camera that I’ll try and steal so I at least have one of that speces on the site. Either way, there will be hopefully some more animals on here after the nice warm weekend coming up.

 Share

Kelly and I finally got out of the house to try out luck in the low 70’s weather we’ve been having. We’re both still getting over being sick so lazily poking around a local mountain was a great time. We saw a lot of side blotched (Uta stansburian) and Ornate Tree (Urosaurus ornatus) lizards, but no snakes or chucks. Oh well. It was a nice day and we made the most of it by finding a nice place to sit for awhile, and for me to practice a little with some high dynamic range photography on my new camera. I saved them as high-res desktop graphics for wide-format monitors. Download them and check them out.

Regular picture of a regular lizard out looking for a girlfriend (this isn’t the HDR, obivously).

Desert HDR 1 (right-click to save as):

Desert HDR 2 (right-click to save as):

 Share