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Posted by rtdunham on April 06, 2003 at 14:42:28:
Bruce Skipper, Lindsay Pike and I spent a couple hours east of tampa friday. Didn't find a whole lot--I'm still skunked for scarlet kings after 35 years in florida, compared to Bruce's and Lindsay's successes this year alone. Still, it's always good to get outdoors with friends.
Five seconds after we left the car and stepped into the woods beside the road, we saw this four-foot-plus black racer basking on a brush pile:
Trees had overgrown some old fencing beside a horse pasture: We hunted through, turned around, and minutes after our first "pass" we found this yellow rat right where we'd been. He was halfway through a hole in a piece of plywood nailed vertically to some fenceposts and was NOT there minutes earlier. I included both pix so you could see him "coming and going" the way we found him:
Lindsay held him for a pic. Despite the rep yellow rats have, it never tried to strike. A nice five-footer, it did put a hellacious musk on lindsay.
Lindsay's most impressive accomplishment of the trip, however, was catching a racerunner or two by hand. If you've tried that before, you know how hard that is, especially on a sunny day around 80 degrees F. when they're fully active.
This hunting was all in proximity to commercial development. Other finds & catches included a toad and a treefrog (cuban?), a few skinks and green anoles, and a opossum with her babies.
Terry Dunham
Albino Tricolors
