Déjà View. June 11 and 12th.

My car has been acting up and, well... gas prices are stupid, so we have to plan our outings accordingly. I splurged and sunk an extra $20 into the tank last weekend so we could go to Plymouth County, once again in search of a Hognose, Green or even a Ringneck. I'll cut to the chase, the only snake we saw was  the grass moving in a serpentine pattern away from us at one point... likely a Racer who saw us first.

Here is what we did see... for the second time in a row, we saw a Painter basking atop a tire in the vernal that we made famous in the story "When the Pool Runs Red". Ok, maybe not famous...

From there, we headed over to the bog where we always see frogs. We saw frogs. Bulls and Greens, some stunning examples of both. I'm not labeling each one because I'm likely the only person still reading this, and I know which is which.

Andrea found this neat, adult Antlion.

A couple more pretty Bulls.

As we got closer to the pond, we heard a lot of splishin' and splashin'... when we got to the edge, this was all we could see of a Painted line-up.

It was quite hot and Andrea wanted to cool off.

This Bull and I watched her from the edge.

We sat down for a while to relax and watch the water. There were a few Painters nearby but they were safely hidden from my intrusive camera.

Before leaving the bogs, I photographed one last Green Frog.

The next stop was the one where we had the highest hopes of snakes but, no... we failed. But the pond had a nice fat Bully.

Not to mention some distant Painters.

The recent rains had things moist under most of the logs but this shy Redback was the only salamander seen.

One positive... whereas we'd seen no toads on our previous visit, the place was literally Hopping with Fowler's Toads this time.

As we always do, we headed over to see if any Redbellies were up basking. There were. We could see 11 in our line of sight and they were all massive. Here is a glance at 7 of them...

From near to far, here are close-ups of the ones in that picture...

^ A couple of adult Painters for comparison.

These three Redbells were also right there.

Sure, we see them every time but it's always a real treat.

One thing we'd never seen there before... goats!

So, same ol' same ol'? Well, yeah, but all of the animals we saw are beautiful and it's worth the gas money.

That said, I had to ask that we stay close to home on Sunday. We went over to a nearby spot in Norfolk County for a hike. It was pretty warm but breezy and it seemed like a perfect day. We hiked in, got to the Alley and hiked the length of it and admittedly, I was getting a bit cranky after  over 2 miles of nothing. I just wanted to see a damn snake.

We finally got back and went through the tunnel to walk the woods. We were pretty much instantly rewarded with the first Wood Frog we've seen in over two months. A lovely rusty one, at that.

Then, Andrea unjinxed us when she saw a beautiful Milk crawling through the brush. I could reach it, so I pulled it out for photos. It was not happy with my decision.

A feisty, tail-rattlin' tough guy. We let it be but it still  wanted a piece of us.

Well, that felt good. I was happy after just the Wood Frog but this was finally an actual snake!

Even better, Andrea next spied this absolutely perfect Garter gal... easily 30", probably closer to 3 feet.

Perfect tail, no scars that I could see and the most brilliant solid white stripe ever! Stunning!

That helped my mood out quite a lot. We did over 5 1/2 miles on this hike and it felt good to finally see a few critters. This little Redback was our last find.

So, we didn't get to check anything off of our huge "need-it" list this weekend but we got our sun, our exercise and got to see some critters. Nine species is OK considering we've not put a lot of effort into it other than walking a few miles with our eyes open.