Ending the Summer that Never Was. Sept. 15th and 17th

I thought Andrea was still on half-day Fridays. Nope. So my plans of an after work hike vanished into thin air. But she said "why not go visit the turtles on my lunch break?" So that's what we did. We were warned of a massive storm coming Saturday (the next day) and figured we'd be inside then.

It seems the turtles were wise to the upcoming turmoil because we didn't see any basking and only a few noggins were popping up at all. We did see a Snapper... Whitey?... but he blew us off. This Painted Turtle was the first one I got my camera on.

This GBH looks like I usually feel.

On the far side of the pond, we finally saw a couple of basking Painters. No Red-ears... weird.

The uncooperative Snappers remained uncooperative. Got this one eventually...

The next day, it did storm a little but it was much less that predicted. But with the rain and cooler temps, we decided to take a quick local hike on Sunday in Norfolk County. We chose a trail that had potential for four First-of-Years... Coppers, Racers, Marbleds and one other that we'd forgotten about until we saw it.

Spotted Salamander metamorphs were the Salamander du jour!

It was then that we flipped a First-of-Year... hard to believe that it took until September but that is indicative of 2023 for us. This is the FOY Red-spotted Newt of any phase... a Red Eft.

Handsome fella, too.

The log next to the Eft, the very next flip, was our FOY Marbled.

They were definitely a target so we were pretty happy.

This Green Frog made his presence known by hopping into the drink in front of me.

Another new Spotted!

This is NOT a new Spotted Sal!

We hunted around the rocks and lower area around the Coppertop spot but respected the rule (that we've heard tell about) about not going near the densite. We did a pretty thorough search at low and medium points, but came up empty for all snakes. But we can't feel bad... we gave it our best effort and we had seen a lot of nice salamanders.

This scary bat-monster face in a log mirrors how our feet/ankles were feeling after a while.

One complaint... we saw no Redbacks. What I used to call the most common land vertebrae in the area has become very tough to see with any regularity. This is my worry for 2023. Last year it was the absence of Fowler's Toads at Myles Standish. They are plentiful this year. Hopefully, our beloved Plethodons will be abundant again soon.