North Carolina Part One: April 1st, 2011

When planning our trip to North Carolina to marry my mom off, we tried to work in as much herping time as possible. We caught a 6:00 AM flight from Boston to Raleigh/ Durham and hoped that along our 2 1/2 hour drive to mom's house, we'd have some chances to look for critters.

Upon getting into NC, we realized that it was cooler than expected. After all, it was only 9 AM! So we tried to put some miles behind us. We passed many interesting spots... piles of tin, abandoned buildings and the like, but we didn't feel like trespassing and getting arrested, so we passed them by. After a couple of hours, we decided to hit a "rest stop" just to stretch and poke around. Besides, we had to pee!

While Andrea was still incarcerated in the lil' ladies' room, I started poking around the outside of the spacious rest area, about 10 miles outside of New Bern. I saw some movement in a pot of flowers... Green Anole! Luckily, though he was green, he was cool enough for me to nab him!



While walking him back to his flower pot, Andrea said, "We should keep an eye out on the building...". Prophetic. There was a larger Anole right there, still in her brown jammies!


Of course we had to take advantage of the 2 green anole photo op!

The smaller green guy was checking her out. She said her name was Nina Grohl.

We put them back and modeled the male (whose name was Buck Dharma) amongst his flowers.


Encouraged, we took a look around the grounds. We saw this massive wasp, whose wing span must have been over 3 inches!


But no more anoles, until we got back to Buck Dharma's pot. There were 3 or 4 running around that one, hiding down the sides when we approached...





Encouraged, we went on our way!

Upon reaching my mom's house, we had a little lunch, but peeked in her backyard while waiting... there was a stripey little green anole hanging out...


After eating, we were going to go to her husband-to-be's property to look around. He lives near a creek and swampland, so we had some good chances. Sadly, it was still fairly cool.

In a lot next to my mom's we found some pine-cones from the rare Vag Tree,


a purple finch (that was in the grass and I almost stepped on!),


and a possibly feral tuxedo cat!


So soon we piled into my mom's speed machine, I mean car, and she zooooomed us over to her intended's land. We met the man who was going to be related to us in less than 24 hours, and started herping his property!

First up was probably an Squirrel Tree frog, hiding on some plastic floaties.



Moving around more floaties, we uncovered a quartet of hylids!





Next up was a large (wolf?) spider!



With Jim(my mum's sweetie)'s permission, we started peeling back bark from some fallen pine trees. There were some brilliant green tiger beetles in there, which we neglected to photograph. Then we saw a flash of bright blue. A tiger bettle? Nope! A young 5-lined Skink!


He was squirmy as hell and I was afraid of him dropping his tail, but everything stayed cool...



We also found another tree frog inside the bark...


After that, we were beat! (Hell, we got up at 3:45 AM!) We went home to rest up for the excitement of the next day!