Can Cutler Keep Cutting It? 6-16-2012

Cutler has been very very good to us this year, but we know there will be off days. You just can't keep up the good luck every time out, and this day was... well... slow. We got there at 8:20 AM and it was still coolish, but Racer Alley was hot and toasty already. And empty.

Hitting the woods (after an hour and a half) we finally saw a Redback Salamander... a very red one indeed!


We saw a deer print, but there was no deer attached.


We saw some Painted Turtle eggs, but a predator saw them first...


In the last month, Cutler has grown in pretty heavily! Tough to see anything for the foliage! I'm not complaining, just commenting...

Finally, half way done, we found a feisty little Garter Snake! I flipped a board and he slowly slid down (still in a coil)! Andrea quickly grabbed him. He was flat and threatening at first...

^Check it out... you can see his stripe from inside his mouth!


But then he mellowed out and posed nicely.



Then we found a Ringneck Snake in a new place for us here!

Very much "in the blue" yet still very iridescent! Can you imagine what this guy will look like with new skin?!



Nearby, we saw another Redback and then a Leadback! Both were so nutty that we barely got a good pic of either!



Walking back, we kept our eyes peeled, happy to have seen even these wee snakelets. Then all of a sudden, we were stopped in our tracks by a surprise trail-mate! A Painted Turtle, probably looking for a good laying spot!




It's always exciting to get a nice, close-up look at such a beautiful animal. We let her go about her business, in hopes of seeing more of her kind soon!

So, not a slam-bang, biff-boom-pow kind of hike, but 3 1/2 hours (gotta be a quickness record for us here!) well spent and some cuties found! No complaints here.