Ah, what a wonderful, bright and colorful day it was Sunday! After church we headed towards a glade and picked up our good friend, Trevor, on the way. We drove about an hour and a half and reached our destination. The landscape was cheerfully dotted with some of my old standby glade favorites: indian paintbrush, hoary puccoon, shooting star, bird’s foot violet, wild hyacinth, may apples, American smoketree, fire pink, and prairie dock. They all look amazing back-lit by the sun and have a brightness to them like suncatchers. I just love springtime!
We were after an extra special snake species, the variable ground snake. They are extremely fossorial and therefore difficult to find. To boot, they only occur in a couple glades in Missouri (elsewhere in the states further to our west they are easier to find). Nathan and I spent hours and hours last year trying to find them, and even other folks who looked for them last year didn’t see hide nor hair of variable ground snakes. But this year has been different. A couple of our friends had already seen them in the past week, so we had a really good feeling that today was the day! I was so stoked to be the one to find our lifer variable ground snake.
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