Wednesday - Black Ratsnake captured inside a Walton County, Georgia house and photographed before release. A wonderful birthday present for me! 

Update 1/27/19 - I was recently corrected that I had used antiquated naming in this blog for Pantherophis alleghaniensis, the scientific name for this common eastern colubrid shown above. In my early days of “herping”, we referred to them as Black Ratsnakes. And who would argue? This was a fitting name for a long, black snake that eats rats and mice! But now the correct common name is “Eastern Rat Snake”.  
 
However, there are still some that refer to them as the even blander name of “black snake”. Although an accurate description, I suppose it leaves the identification open to confusion with Black Racers or Indigo Snakes. So I understand the desire for more clarity in a common name.

​I really don’t know how this Gray Fox got his head stuck in a chain-link fence, especially since there was a gap just a few inches to his right. Nevertheless he was thoroughly caught by the neck and exhausted from a night of struggle. Once he was safely sedated, we cut him free and brought him back to the shelter in a carrier to recover. Finding no external injuries and exhibiting no signs of rabies or distemper, once he was fully awake he was released back to the wild.

I'm not quite sure how it happened. Did my interest in reptiles spark my daughter, or did my daughter's interest re-spark me? Either way, we both had a desire to get out there on hikes and find all the little creatures. And like me in the 90's, my daughter wanted to bring them home! We found this box turtle and built it a little enclosure in the backyard to watch for a few weeks. Truly a "box" turtle! 

9:27  AM Woke to find that the flurries that began yesterday hung on through the night to leave an inch thick coating of wet, clinging snow all around us. But the day quickly warmed and almost all was gone by evening. 

"Kylie" was picked up in an eviction when I worked with animal control. She came home and grew in an aquarium in my daughter's bedroom. Eventually we built a small outdoor pond where she lived for nine years until escaping when the water level rose too high during a rain storm. 

Working at Walton Animal Control for just over a month, I began bringing my camera in each day to start photographing the dogs and post them on the internet. There had to be a way to get people to come and adopt from this small, rural shelter I just took over managing.

On my way out to shoot a dog, I passed the web in the parking lot. My camera has been put away for several years. The shelter photography would be the spark to bring it out again! 

June 15, 2008- A summertime trip to visit my parents on Austin, Texas. These are the first nature photos I still have saved using a digital camera, a Nikon D80 which I purchased in November 2007. Of all the wildlife sights to see in Texas, I only shot a couple of photos during this trip. 

​I began working with animal control in 1997. Through the years, I’ve had opportunity to closely interact with animals in hands-on rescue and release. Though I can’t be certain when these photos were taken, it was sometime between 2004 and 2006. 

On another annual trek to Tucson Arizona for our Fellowship's annual Bible Conference, I made another visit to my favorite attraction: the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. They had just built a new Javelina habitat and I was excited to check out this beast, as I had never seen one before. Well, when you visit the museum at high noon on a 101 degree Tucson day, you don't see any Javelinas! They were all hiding in the shade. Bummer. But later that night I spotted spotted several Javelinas "in the wild". They were scraping the cheese off a pizza box beside our hotel dumpster! 

Although every caller to animal control insist the snake in their living room is a rattlesnake, 99% of the time it is not. But this time it was! The newspaper article tells the full story:

I stepped out of my apartment on the west side of Athens, Georgia one afternoon to find this three foot Eastern Black Ratsnake practically choking on a large bird (appears to be an American Robin). 

On a visit to Brasov, Romania, in March 2000, some local friends took me for a bike ride to show me “something exciting” that they knew I would love. It was strange enough riding through the dark streets beneath the towering communist apartment blocks, being chased by loose dogs around every turn. We rode our bikes past piles of garbage surrounding rows of nearly full dumpsters until my friend yelled, “There!” and pointed toward a group of dumpsters. Several Brown Bears were feasting from the trash can!

A few months later on another visit to Brasov in August 2000, I went back to the spot with the local pastor, and two visiting American pastors. When we arrived, a mother and two cubs were raiding the trash. An old Romanian man was throwing fire crackers at the bears from out his apartment window to scare the bears off, which they totally ignored.

Being brave (or foolish), we exited the car for a closer look. It didn’t take long and the mother bear, already aroused by the fire crackers, decided we were too close to her cubs and left the dumpster to charge toward us! We went to one side of the car, she came approached the other. She circled to the front of the car, we ran to the back side of the car. As she continued to come at us, we all dove into the little Dacia. Momma jumped up on the back window of the car, tore off the antenna, and began ripping the weather stripping from around the window!
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We were in a state of shock, unsure how to respond. One of the visiting American pastors sat in the back saying to himself, “How stupid! I just risked my family, my church, my life!” I was exhilarated and loved it! But I suppose my background in wildlife and animal control helped.