Spring Sightings

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

I noticed the picture of the Chicago said it was western Racine county.
I could throw a rock from my Milwaukee county back yard and it would land in Racine county. My wife of 24 years was killed by a drunk driver in Racine county while riding her bike last year.

I may have seen Chicago Garters in the past though. There is a rock area next to the wetland behind my home and I saw some that look like that.
I will take some pictures when they appear in the near future.

I learned more about Garters in this thread than I knew before, thanks everyone.

that is just horrible. I'm so sorry.

[Chulio]

Thanks everybody.
Today was the the first day of the trial and the person plead guilty to homicide by reckless use of a motor vehicle.
I can relax a little now.

[Jeff B]

Man I am sorry about your wife, I can't even imagine how you feel, as much as I cherish my own wife, my deepest condolences to you.
I just wanted to point out that there is likely a lot of integradation between the two sub-species, especially in more borderline/overlapping areas and considering the eastern basically surrounds if not goes right thru the entire chicago range, so my point is that it may not always black and white or cut and dry to define and classify weather a snake (especially in an area or range such as this) fits into the sirtalis semifasciatus or sirtalis sirlalis, but like Joe has pointed out (if Joe says it looks Chicago, then the local authority has spoken, as he has personally seen and put his hands on more true wild semifasciatus than likely anyone out there) the snake in question certainly does have some barring on the side neck, but I think you would agree Joe that we have seen more clearly pronounced barring that runs farther back (you certainly more than me, only had my hands on two semifasiatus personally), so it's even possible the snake in question is a percentage semifasiatus, and that no one argueing on this post is completely right or wrong. The mere fact that semifasiatis has been historically debated of it's even deserving subspecies status in classification, shows us that defining the subspecies has always been a bit of a dicey topic of discussion at best. This is a daily way of open minded objective thinking for me, NOT taking sides here just pointing out some facts, historical data, and possibilities. Honestly in my oppinion without genome maps with good concensus sequence, with conserved regions that show a genetically significant difference between the two sub-species, clearly defining them, followed by sequencing of those differentiation regions of the snake in question, it's a complete morphology guessing game at best. I hope that this kind of work is being done by a grad. student somewhere out there and will be eventually published and then made available to us hobbiest as well. Not that we would be able to feasibly use that data in practise, but rather to see in general if the historical morphology based classification is supported by the nucleic acid sequences. My quess is that for the most part it would be, but even then there might still be shades of gray even at the base pair level that would be argued, lol.

[Mommy2many]

So sorry to hear of the loss of your wife. Welcome to the forum. Nice to have you here.

[ConcinusMan]

Good news everyone, Rhea, Don, Steve. Forecast calls for sunny and 65 tomorrow and friday, and 70 for the first day of spring on Sat. 70 for Sunday. No wind, no clouds, high pressure, etc. NO CHANCE of rain or clouds. I have high hopes for luck with those temperatures and I don't have to work this weekend. Sounds like a weekend for breeding balls. Guess who's going to go stomping around in concinnus/ordinoides territory? (with his camera this time)

[Jeff B]

It has been warm here in Iowa too, saw my first garter snake this morning on the way to work, it was a red-sided, looked like a male, unfortunately it had been run over by a car, guessing either this morning, overnight or yesterday afternoon because it was still fairly fresh looking and not stiff yet.

[jitami]

My wife of 24 years was killed by a drunk driver in Racine county while riding her bike last year.

Ugh... I am so very sorry... I can't even imagine how difficult that would be. My sincere condolences to you and your family.

[ConcinusMan]

Seems the first day of spring and 70 degrees is what was needed to find my first garters of 2010. I did make that trip to Beaverton today. There were so many garter snakes that it was difficult not to step on them. First one sighted was a concinnus that moved extremely fast and disappeared. Wasn't expecting to see one in dense woods. Location: Tualitin/Beaverton, Oregon.

Anyway, I got out of the woods and into some swampy clearings and noticed a strange constant rustling sound. Turns out it was piles of dry leaves teeming with hundreds of ordinoides. Concinnus were not as plentiful but I still saw at least 10 good sized ones.

You may or may not recall a new user who posted pics of concinnus from this same area a couple of months ago and it was noted how the red in these snakes was nearly non-existent. He wasn't kidding. Nearly all the snakes I saw all but lack red. The markings are there, the patterns are normal but the red isn't red. It isn't even orange. I don't know quite how to explain it. Every snake I saw was anerythristic. I couldn't believe my eyes. Very few snakes had any red at all and even then it was represented by an extremely pale orange. Like most populations of concinnus I have encountered, some individuals have greenish dorsal stripes, some have yellow. Unlike Clark County, WA snakes, no laterally striped individuals were found. All other colors and head/neck/facial markings are typical.

Not manipulated. These snakes really do look like this. Not quite black and white but definitely anery. I didn't see a single snake in this area that had normal red/orange. All were anery in varying degrees.






The ordinoides in this location were extraordinarily unattractive. Mostly dark grey with faint cream stripes. And man, there was a lot of them. Nothing remotely attractive except for a few that had a nice spotted pattern and good contrast. I didn't see any red or orange striped individuals or anything unusual or interesting. For that, I will have to try some of the sites around my area later.

[infernalis]

Still no sightings here.... not even a Dekayi.