Articles

Reptiles

These are articles published in amateur herpetological society newsletters with tiny circulations. Putting them online has given them a wider audience.

•••

• How to Write an Article for a Herp Society Newsletter Chorus 23, no. 8 (Oct. 2007)

  I don’t envy Bob’s job. Getting people to write articles for herpetological society newsletters is a difficult if not impossible task, as I know all too well. During my two years editing The Ontario Herpetological Society News (from 1999 to 2001), I had to beg, plead and cajole people to write articles for me. Of the articles I did get, more than a few were so badly written that I had to edit them heavily. Rewriting the articles sentence by sentence did not always go over well with some of the authors, who objected to every change I made to their prose. Even if it was awful. Especially, it seemed, if it was awful.

  But problems with grammar and spelling weren’t the only issues. In many cases the articles were written well enough, but were in a convoluted and overwrought style; others didn’t seem to have much of a point. And some were just too darn long.

  Don’t misunderstand me: herpers aren’t necessarily bad writers. But I do think they could use some guidance—some advice that would allow them to make the most of what they’ve got, and say what they’re trying to say, without tripping up. Every kind of writing is different: you don’t write a newspaper article, or an instruction manual, the same way you write a novel. No one, to my knowledge, has sat down to write something that said, “This is how you write an article for a herpetological newsletter.” So I thought I would try.

• The Seven Rules of Raising Baby Garter Snakes Chorus 22, no. 5 (May 2006)

  Few people are crazy enough to breed garter snakes and raise the babies, but more than a few of us have unexpectedly been handed the task of raising a large number of baby garter snakes. We may, for example, have been handed a “rescued” garter snake that turns out to be very, very pregnant, which then surprises you one day with dozens of her offspring slithering around her cage.

  Oh great, you think. Now what? Suddenly you’re faced with having to look after a whole bunch of little snakes. The sheer number of them can make that a very intimidating situation. And raising baby garter snakes isn’t the same as raising a litter or two of corn snakes. Garter snakes don’t eat mice, you think, and they’re too small for pinkies anyway — how are you going to feed them all?

  Taking care of an adult garter snake, especially if it’s been trained to eat mice, isn’t really any different from taking care of your average colubrid. But baby garter snakes are different. Their special requirements can trip you up if you’re not ready for them, but they’re not that difficult once you know them. I call them the Seven Rules of Raising Baby Garter Snakes, and I’ll share them with you here.

• Raising Baby Garter Snakes: Some Personal Observations The Garter Snake, April 2005

  The herpetocultural literature on the raising of young garter snakes is surprisingly scant. Apart from some issues of diet, the care of adult garter snakes is little different from that of any other medium-sized North American colubrid. Books on the subject either deal with neonate garter snake care in very general terms, or treat it as similar to that of other snakes. But this is not the case. There are some definite differences in the care of newborn garter snakes, especially in terms of feeding and housing. As a result, when my garter snakes started breeding in the spring of 2001, I was not prepared for some of the surprises their offspring had in store for me.

  What I propose to do in this article is to share what I’ve learned from raising a few litters¹ of garter snakes, plus a few neonates that I did not breed, but acquired when they were very young. This is by no means scientific or definitive, but anecdotal. It’s merely what I’ve observed. If your observations differ, by all means share them: at this point, we need as many observations as we can get, if we’re to understand better how to look after our charges.

• St. John’s Reptiles of the Northwest Ark’Type, Aug.-Sept.-Oct. 2003
  Reptiles of the Northwest
  by Alan St. John
  Lone Pine, 2002. Softcover, 272 pp. ISBN 1-55105-349-7

  Regional field guides generally beat the Audubon or Peterson guides hands-down when it comes to descriptions of local ranges, subspecies, and habitat. Some guides provide only limited information in the interest of keeping their size down, sacrificing their usefulness as a reference for their pocketability (e.g. MacCullough’s ROM Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Ontario). Other guides provide authoritative information in rich, comprehensive quantities, but in a thick book that is kind of hard to carry with you — they’re more textbooks than field guides (e.g. Harding’s Amphibians and Reptiles of the Great Lakes Region or Werler and Dixon’s Texas Snakes). Both methods produce good field guides; it’s just a matter of which kind of guide you need: pocketable or definitive.

  Alan St. John’s very fine Reptiles of the Northwest manages to maintain its pocketability (and therefore its usefulness in the field) without sacrificing as much, in terms of information, as other guides. It does skimp a bit on information about the animals themselves; facts about their diet, reproduction and behaviour are condensed into a paragraph each. But this is by no means a meagre book. Instead, it is a field guide worthy of the name that focuses on where and how to find reptiles in northwestern North America and how to identify them. It provides very good subspecies data — a rare thing nowadays, when it’s fashionable to deprecate subspecies in favour of elevating them to full species or writing them off as undiagnosable variants. For example, since I breed the rascals, I was glad to learn how to determine the different subspecies of Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer). And, in addition to excellent, full-colour range maps, there is photography so beautifully staged and lit that you want to buy them as prints and frame them — including such gems as photos of tiny baby horned lizards (Phrynosoma) and of a Red-spotted Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis concinnus) swallowing a very toxic Rough-skinned Newt (Taricha granulosa).

  Most of all, I enjoyed the field notes at the end of each species description, in which St. John tells a personal story about finding the animal in question in the wild (often for the purpose of photographing it for this book). These entertaining tales make Reptiles of the Northwest one of the most unique field guides I have encountered in years, and reminds us that a field guide is really about searching for, encountering and interacting with animals in the field — and this point is ably illustrated by the often-funny photos of snakes dangling off someone’s ear or lizards biting someone’s hand. Highly recommended.

• The ROM Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Ontario The OHS News 92 (July 2002)
  The ROM Field Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles of Ontario
  by Ross D. MacCullough
  McClelland & Stewart, 2002. Softcover, 168 pp. ISBN 0-7710-7651-7

  Ontarians have not had a field guide to their reptiles and amphibians for some time, at least not since Bob Johnson’s Familiar Reptiles and Amphibians of Ontario (1989). Whereas Johnson’s little book was illustrated with black-and-white sketches that may or may not have resembled the actual animal in question, this new pocket guide is a showcase for excellent herp photography, giving each species native to Ontario three full-colour photographs on the facing page of each written description.

  It’s important to remember that this is a field guide, focused on the identification of wildlife in the field, and as such is not terribly in-depth — after all, it’s supposed to fit in your pocket! Each species is limited to a page of description and a page of photographs, a format which, for the most part, works rather well. Information is basic (identification, habitat, diet, reproduction), concise and, for the most part, accurate.

  But brevity can be risky, and errors can sometimes creep in. Describing Butler’s Garter Snakes as “more slender” than Common Garter Snakes (p. 130) is, in my experience, a mistake; and the description of the Fowler’s Toad’s call as simply “shorter” than that of the American Toad (p. 68) is not correct either. Nor is there any distinction between the Eastern and Red-sided subspecies of the Common Garter; descriptions are at the species level, and different subspecies are not always distinguished.

• Pelee Island Field Trip Report The OHS News 92 (July 2002)

  On Victoria Day weekend, 23 crazy herpers from Ontario, Quebec and Michigan travelled to Pelee Island to stay at the Wilds of Pelee Island Outdoor Centre for Conservation, where they would help restore habitat and build hibernation and nesting sites for endangered reptiles and amphibians, and perhaps to catch a glance of the elusive Blue Racer (Coluber constrictor foxii). In spite of forecasts calling for rain throughout the weekend and rather cold temperatures, we did pretty well. While it was quite chilly, the weather obliged us by raining only at night (though this was a problem for some of us with less than optimal tents).

  While the total number of reptiles spotted was somewhat lower than last year, that was mostly as a result of a change in our activities: we omitted a survey of the Centre property and a check of the tin and boards along a lane across from the Stone Road Alvar Nature Reserve — both of which produced copious numbers of Eastern Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis) and Brown Snakes (Storeria dekayi) last year. (By the way, about one-third of the garter snakes on Pelee Island are melanistic.) Because we weren’t consciously looking for these two species, we only came up with a handful of them. The garter snakes were usually none too happy to see us, especially the melanistics, which I’ve always found to be larger and more aggressive on the Island. And we missed finding adult Lake Erie Water Snakes (Nerodia sipedon insularum) — we found lots of them mating along the road last year, only a few hundred metres from the ferry dock — but found a number of juveniles, both last year’s young and those a year older, both of which still had their patterns.

• A Tale of Two Snakes Chorus 18, no. 10 (Dec. 2001)

  Two of the snakes we have cared for would have interesting stories to tell. They can’t talk, of course, so I’ll tell their stories for them. Both were snakes that came in from the wild under extraordinary circumstances. It’s amazing that either of them managed to survive. One we have kept, one we have released: when you read their stories, you’ll understand why.

  The first snake was found in a head of lettuce in the produce section of a Toronto-area supermarket. He was very small, very frightened, and very pugnacious. He was immediately rescued by local hobbyists who were determined to prevent him from being used by the supermarket as evidence against the suppliers on whose trucks they supposed he arrived — they didn’t expect he would survive long as evidence. All parties presumed that he had arrived on a food shipment from the southern U.S., and on that basis, this small snake with bright burgundy blotches was identified as a Prairie Kingsnake (Lampropeltis calligaster calligaster).

  Florence, hearing this story, decided that she wanted to adopt this snake, and the person looking after him was happy to oblige her. So, in early May 2000 I brought him back with me to Ottawa. He was small, still very shy, but not aggressive, and he seemed to be eating well.

• Questions About Ribbon Snakes in Captivity Chorus 18, no. 8 (Oct. 2001)

  When I first had the idea to write a short article about keeping ribbon snakes in captivity, my plan was to explain why ribbon snakes were a poor “beginner” snake in spite of their low price at pet stores. I would have based that argument on the herpetocultural literature on ribbon snakes and on our own experience with our single Western Ribbon Snake, which to date has made for a less than satisfactory captive. But things have gotten a bit more complicated since then, and now I’m left with more questions about ribbon snakes than answers. Which is probably a good thing.

  There are two species of ribbon snake: the Eastern Ribbon Snake (Thamnophis sauritus), with four subspecies, one of which, the Northern Ribbon (T. s. septentrionalis), is native to our area; and the Western (Thamnophis proximus), with six subspecies, ranging from Wisconsin to Costa Rica. Biochemically they seem less closely related to other garter snakes than do some water snakes, and they are certainly each other’s closest relative: speciation has occurred quite recently, and they were only recognized as separate species in 1962 when they were discovered to occur in the same area without interbreeding.

  Telling the difference between an Eastern and a Western Ribbon Snake is quite easy: Western Ribbon Snakes have two sometimes fused white spots on the top of their heads; Eastern Ribbon Snakes do not. Ribbon snakes can be differentiated from garter snakes by their overall shape: they’re very elongate; their side stripes are higher up on the body (on the third and fourth scale rows — most garters’ stripes are on the second and third rows); and there is no black between their labial (lip) scales.

• Some Notes on Wandering Garter Snakes The OHS News 89 (Sept. 2001)

  Wandering Garter Snakes (Thamnophis elegans vagrans) will never win any ophidian beauty contests. They are essentially gray or grayish-brown snakes with a black checkered pattern and three cream-coloured stripes (occasionally the side stripes are not visible). To hobbyists enamoured of tricoloured milk snakes or mountain kingsnakes, they must seem quite drab, though their appearance might appeal to those of us who appreciate subtler, more subdued patterns (such as Baird’s Rat Snakes or Gopher Snakes). But whatever you think of their appearance, these are nevertheless very interesting snakes. They are reckoned as being one of the best (if not the best) garter snakes to keep in captivity, and they are probably the least garter-like garter snake north of Mexico.

  Wandering Garter Snakes get their name from the belief that they tend to travel further from water than other garter snakes, but in fact studies have found them to be primarily a riparian habitat specialist. They are found at surprisingly high altitudes — they range from the Prairies to the West Coast, and cross the Rocky Mountains. The Wandering Garter is the widest-ranging of six subspecies of the Western Terrestrial Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans), and the only one found in Canada. It and the Coast Garter Snake (T. e. terrestris) are the only two that have any presence in the hobby — the red phase of the coast garter is spectacular and particularly coveted. But the coast garter is endemic to California, which prohibits the sale of all but a few native snakes, and as a result is a bit harder to find.

• Spotting the Spotted Turtle Chorus 18, no. 5 (May 2001)

  On the morning of April 13, 2001, six OARA members departed Ottawa for an undisclosed location in southwestern Ontario. They were Andrew Mott, Brian Oehring, Jeremy Pallas, Marc St. Pierre, Florence Lehmann and myself, crammed with our gear into a rented minivan for a long road trip. Once there, we would join Steve Marks, Mike Elioff, Dave Smith, Stewart Stick and Drew and Killian Hamilton to search for the Spotted Turtle (Clemmys guttata). We were participants in a scientific study (under permit) to see whether this species was found at the site in question. While a substantial number of turtles had been present a quarter century ago, more recent surveys had found few, if any. Last year, the first year of our survey, only two turtles had been found: an old female last spring and a male in June. We didn’t know if a viable breeding colony was present — the male was found a kilometre from the female’s site — but we were nonetheless hopeful.

  Steve, who was organizing this survey, now in its second year, has been very careful not to mention publicly where this location is, and has been screening the people who were able to attend. And for good reason. Spotted Turtles, like other members of the genus Clemmys, are cute and interesting turtles with personality, and would make great pets if their conservation status wasn’t a problem. They are listed as a species of special concern by COSEWIC and are protected by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. They are also protected over most of their range. Even so, with the wholesale price in the United States for a Spotted Turtle being around $150, poaching is a concern. It’s happened in Ontario. And Steve, knowing that this was a very sensitive population, is taking no chances.

• Domestic Mice as Food for Butler’s Garter Snakes The OHS News 88 (March 2001)

  (with Jeff Hathaway)

  Nowhere in the recent herpetological or herpetocultural literature regarding Butler’s Garter Snakes, Thamnophis butleri, are rodents referred to as a potential food source, either in captivity or in the wild.¹ Field studies have confirmed that earthworms make up the overwhelming proportion of a Butler’s Garter Snake’s diet, followed by leeches; laboratory studies have shown that they also react to toads, small frogs, red-backed salamanders and small fish (Catling and Freedman 1980, Rossman, Ford and Seigel 1996).

  Although Butler’s Garters are clearly earthworm specialists in the wild, many herpetocultural authorities, perhaps relying on dated sources that refer briefly to several prey items (e.g. Ditmars 1939, Logier 1958 and Wright and Wright 1957), seem unclear about their diet. Perlowin (1992) makes no specific comments about the species’s diet, referring only in passing to chopped earthworms and feeder guppies for neonates. Sweeney (1992) is uncertain, saying that the diet “is thought to include earthworms, leeches, small frogs and salamanders” in the wild. Rossi (1992), on the other hand, states that “earthworms are definitely the preferred food” but allows for small fish and amphibians as well. None of these authorities mention rodents. Yet we have managed to maintain six specimens of Butler’s Garters on a diet that either includes, or is mostly or even entirely based upon, domestic mice.

• Werler and Dixon’s Texas Snakes The OHS News 87 (Dec. 2000)
  Texas Snakes: Identification, Distribution and Natural History
  by John E. Werler and James R. Dixon
  University of Texas Press, 2000. Hardcover, xv + 437 pp. + plates.
  ISBN 0-292-79130-5

  Work began on this book twenty years ago, the authors inform us in the preface. Even taking into account the fact that for most of that period, the authors had other responsibilities and could not have worked full-time on this project, that seems an awfully long time to spend on a single work. Looking at the book, though, it is easy to see why. It has all the usual sections you would expect from such a guide: a general introduction, an identification key, a note on venom, an extensive bibliography and, of course, species and subspecies accounts. But those accounts have a level of detail and thoroughness that are unmatched by any other guide, including Tennant’s Field Guide to Texas Snakes, and each gives an in-depth survey of the scientific knowledge of the snake in question. With so much attention paid to each of Texas’s 109 species and subspecies, no wonder it took so long.

  The range maps, which astonishingly were not generated by computer, are extraordinarily detailed and precise. Instead of just a shaded area covering a snake’s general range, dots show precisely where specimens of a given snake were found, and the maps are large enough and detailed enough to show rivers and county boundaries. In southwest Texas, interestingly, the dots are frequently densely packed along lines — presumably the highways along which the specimens were collected! One point of confusion is that the shaded areas around the dots indicate the subspecies, while the dots themselves indicate the species. Thus, for example, the dots on the maps for the Speckled Kingsnake (Lampropeltis getula holbrooki) and the Desert Kingsnake (L. g. splendida) are identical, except that the shading for each indicates which dots belong to which subspecies. A related wrinkle is that, unlike the Gulf field guides, zones of integradation are not shown: a locality belongs to one subspecies or the other, with no room for ambiguity.

  Then there are the illustrations — 208 colour photographs, most of which are large and many of which are breathtaking, and dozens of line illustrations. No skimping here.

  Taxonomy is always a sure point of contention. Nitpickers will certainly find enough reason to complain, since this book does not always follow the standard common and scientific names established by Collins. The authors do not necessarily follow the logic that allopatric populations are distinct species, and make calls on a case by case basis. Whatever they’re called, the snakes remain the snakes, and it should make no difference to the usefulness of this book.

  Texas Snakes is the best guide to North American snakes that I have yet seen, and though its sheer bulk makes it of limited use as a field guide, it is strongly recommended for anyone with an interest in the snakes in question.

• Holman’s Fossil Snakes of North America The OHS News 87 (Dec. 2000)
  Fossil Snakes of North America: Origin, Evolution, Distribution, Paleoecology
  by J. Alan Holman
  Indiana University Press, 2000. Hardcover, xi + 357 pp. ISBN 0-253-33721-6

  The study of fossil snakes is not nearly as accessible as you might expect. It’s highly specialized work that doesn’t excite the popular imagination nearly as much as a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The following quotation from Fossil Snakes of North America is instructive:

  Fossil snakes usually occur in the form of disarticulated bones, mainly vertebrae and ribs, with a few cranial bones turning up now and then. Rarely, fossil snakes occur as essentially complete skeletons. The problem is that these specimens are usually at least partially embedded in hard rock, which obscures the important diagnostic characters of the individual bones. For this reason, most paleontologists who study snakes would rather have a perfectly preserved middle trunk vertebra than a complete skeleton embedded in rock. (p. 9)

  Analyzing the characteristics of tiny snake vertebrae — now really, where’s the fun in that? Unfortunately it will be hard for popular interests in snakes and paleontology to converge: snakes are essentially delicate creatures that don’t fossilize well. Also, we like their pretty colours, which don’t fossilize at all.

  All of which is not to fault this book, but it is cold water in the face for those anticipating something more, well, dinosaurish. This is a very dry and technical read: very thorough, lots and lots of detail, easily the reference on the subject, but there’s not much of a narrative to speak of. It does have quite a bit of interesting material. Almost all the North American snake fossils are from the Cenozoic era, and most are from the Pleistocene epoch. While some of the fossils are from extinct snake families, genera, or species, many are from modern taxa — sometimes in locations you wouldn’t expect. Fox snakes in Idaho! They were much more widespread once, but then, they would have had to have been, since their current range was once under a glacier.

  You will learn more about the subtle differences in snake vertebrae than you probably ever wanted by reading this book. The shape of a snake’s vertebrae is diagnostic; hardly any other characteristics can be used by the paleontologist. This means that sometimes a fossil can only be tentatively assigned to a genus. It also means a somewhat different species concept.

  Unless you’re extremely interested in the subject, this book is best left to specialists.

• How Volunteer Organizations Work — And Why They Don’t The OHS News 87 (Dec. 2000)

  I’ve been volunteering my time for various organizations since I was sixteen. (That was silly of me, I know.) I’ve held executive positions on volunteer boards for about as long. By the time I was twenty I was cynical enough about it that I composed a little document called Crowe’s Laws of Meetings, which distilled all the wisdom I purported to have gleaned from several years of witnessing the shenanigans that took place at board meetings. “All meetings start fifteen minutes late”, “It’s easier to criticize someone else’s work than do your own — and at a meeting it’s hard to tell the difference”, and so forth. I lost the document years ago and I wish I hadn’t.

  Now this has nothing to do with the board meetings of the OHS (really!), but thinking about this makes me think about what some of those organizations were trying to do — when they weren’t figuring out new ways to impeach each other, that is. The greatest concern of any executive board on which I served was how to get the membership more involved in the activities of that organization. It seemed to us that no matter what we could come up with, trying to get the membership to “get involved” only seemed to leave us frustrated. Executive members are usually pretty committed to the cause (otherwise they wouldn’t be on the board), and so it’s easy to forget why someone not so committed would shell out the money to join an organization, and yet not participate. One mistake frequently made (which I think became Crowe’s Law Number 13) was to spend much newsletter space and meeting time begging the membership to get involved. In my opinion this always backfired: the more you ask the membership to get involved, the more you turn them off, I thought. Still, the frustration was understandable: we’d organize these big meetings and only a few people would turn up. (Nowadays I think a turnout of 10% or more of the membership is pretty good. If you think 15-20 people at an OHS meeting isn’t all that hot, try having only 15-20 people turn up, out of a total membership of 1,400!)

• Understanding Garter Snakes Through Their Diets Chorus 17, no. 8 (Oct. 2000)

  Garter snakes are known for eating a variety of endothermic prey, such as amphibians (especially frogs and toads), fish, earthworms, and even slugs and leeches. But it’s more complicated than that. Several garter snake species specialize on only a few of these prey items and refuse the others; other species will eat all of these and more. For example, some people may not know that a few species will eat small mammals or birds, which makes it possible to feed them mice in captivity. Not only that, but the Western Terrestrial Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans) has an exceptionally broad range of prey preferences: it also likes to eat reptiles, including snakes (so they must be kept separately in captivity). Then there are the exceptions, like the Mexican Alpine Blotched Garter Snake (Thamnophis scalaris), which is known only to eat lizards. So it’s a mistake to assume that all garters eat the same kind of food. It’s important to pay close attention to what garters eat, especially if you’re thinking about keeping one in captivity. What I will do in this article is shed a little light on the complexity and variation in garter snakes’ diets, both in the wild and in captivity.

  In my presentation at the OARA meeting on September 12, I used Rossi and Rossi’s (1995) division of North American garter snakes into three categories by prey preference as a way of summarizing the genus: the big, nasty, long-headed, bug-eyed aquatic fish and amphibian specialists; the small, docile, short-headed worm and slug specialists; and, in between, several terrestrial species that, in Rossi and Rossi’s words, “will eat almost anything.” This third category of garter snake is the one with which we are most familiar, because they are common snakes with large ranges, and because they are the most likely to turn up in the pet trade. But we have to be careful about saying that they will eat anything. In fact, these generalists are very much like the two categories of specialists: they all make use of the prey available in their habitat. It’s just that the generalists are found in many different kinds of habitat, and so have developed a wide range of prey preferences. In fact, as Richard Seigel points out in his chapter on ecology in The Garter Snakes: Evolution and Ecology, the monograph he co-authored with Douglas Rossman and Neil Ford, a garter snake’s habitat has a bigger impact on its diet than its species — and other factors, such as season and age, are also significant influences. When you think about it, the reason why some species of snakes have specialized in a certain prey is because they have specialized in a given habitat, which eliminates other options for food.

• The Art of War on the Online Forums The OHS News 86 (Sept. 2000)

  Everyone who has spent any time on the kingsnake.com forum has their own horror stories to tell. Here are some of mine.

  I once got involved in a verbal fracas that started when someone asked what kind of snake it was that he just caught, which turned out to be a scarlet snake (Cemophora coccinea). Some of us argued that, since scarlet snakes are obscenely difficult to keep, it should be released at once; but others thought there was nothing wrong with keeping it, and gave a grand total of two sentences’ worth of care advice. The ensuing fight went on long after the person who found the snake announced that he had already released it.

  Or how about the snotty e-mail I received from someone who had asked where he could catch black rat snakes; I had suggested that they could be bought very cheaply (for the record, he wasn’t in Ontario), so why collect from the wild? His comments, dripping with bitter sarcasm, went along these lines: well, why don’t you buy me one, then.

• Two New Corn Snake Manuals The OHS News 85 (Spring 2000)
  The Corn Snake Manual
  by Bill Love and Kathy Love
  Advanced Vivarium Systems, 2000. Paperback, 128 pp. ISBN 1-88277054-4
  
  Corn Snakes
  by R. D. Bartlett and Patricia Bartlett
  Barron’s, 1999. Paperback, 48 pp. ISBN 0-7641-1120-5

  Corn snakes, for snakes that are comparatively easy to keep — corn snakes are to herpetoculture what boiling water is to cooking: screw that up and you probably shouldn’t try anything else — are a lot more complicated than they used to be. In 1991, Michael J. McEachern’s Color Guide to Corn Snakes described a handful of single- and double-recessive mutations and a couple of distinctive locality morphs. Now there are more morphs than I myself can keep track of, and it’s kind of hard to figure out what they all are.

  Fortunately, we now have, after some delay, The Corn Snake Manual, by Bill and Kathy Love. Intended as a successor to McEachern’s Color Guide and Keeping and Breeding Corn Snakes, the Loves’ book is easily the best and most comprehensive care guide on the shelves (though the two by McEachern are still worth getting if you can still find them.) Each section covers its subject with an amazing thoroughness: a lengthy treatise on brumation; a thoughtful couple of pages on stress; even a serious investigation of commercial snake sausages (ick!) under feeding. That thoroughness also carries over to the lavishly illustrated section covering colour and pattern morphs: we not only get a picture and a brief description, but also the history of how that given morph came about (and by whom). So now I discover that a pewter is a combination of bloodred and charcoal (anerythristic B), that butter is an amelanistic caramel, that a milk snake phase is a selectively bred Miami phase … With so much useful and interesting information in this book, every hobbyist with corn snakes simply has to have it.

  But for someone just starting out, particularly if he or she is younger, I might suggest that he or she start with the Bartletts’ (them again!) short book, Corn Snakes. It’s short and to the point, covers all the necessary information in only 48 pages, and is well and clearly laid out. For beginners, The Corn Snake Manual might be like an oversize mouse to a young corn snake — nutritious, eagerly attacked, but a bit too much to digest all at once.

• Tennant and Bartlett’s Snakes of North America The OHS News 84 (Winter 2000)
  Snakes of North America: Eastern and Central Regions
  by Alan Tennant and R. D. Bartlett
  Gulf, 2000. Paperback, xxv + 588 pp. ISBN 0-87719-307-X
  
  Snakes of North America: Western Region
  by R. D. Bartlett and Alan Tennant
  Gulf, 2000. Paperback, xvi + 312 pp. ISBN 0-87719-312-6

  Snake nuts will want to know about these books. If, like me, they are particularly fond of North American snakes, they may already own copies of the three field guides already published by Gulf: A Field Guide to Snakes of Florida and A Field Guide to Texas Snakes (the latter already in its second edition), both by Alan Tennant, and A Field Guide to Snakes of California by Philip Brown. Brown’s guide is not as satisfying as the two by Tennant, which provide a heady amount of information on each subspecies, more than could be found in any other field guide. And while Texas and Florida have a lot of snakes between the two of them, I couldn’t help but want even more — information on the snakes that didn’t live in either state.

  Now, in two new volumes, one of which is over 600 pages, those wants have been fulfilled. Snakes of North America, in particular the volume on eastern and central regions, takes many of its species accounts more or less directly from the books on Texas and Florida, and the overlap can be considerable. The volume on the western region, on which collaborator Dick Bartlett is the lead author, is considerably slimmer. Not having Tennant’s detailed subspecies accounts from his previous books to draw upon, the western volume covers snakes on a species-by-species (rather than subspecies-by-subspecies) basis, leaving most subspecies with a paragraph of description at most. Are western subspecies less well-defined than eastern subspecies? Less detailed and slimmer, the western volume is more spartan: it lacks the eastern volume’s bibliography and glossary, too.

  Some tradeoffs have to be made when moving to the continental scale. Chapters on habitat and identification keys would be too unwieldy in this context, and the maps suffer a similar loss of detail and precision. The maps are particularly problematic in the eastern and central volume for Canadian readers, as they quite often do not include Canada at all (though their Canadian range is discussed in the text). On the western side, the maps show all races of a given species at once, which makes them more difficult to decipher. On the plus side, the photographs of every single North American subspecies (some of which have several photos) are stunning, and represent a visual resource impossible to find anywhere else.

  The attraction of having a complete reference on the snakes of North America cannot be understated. Even if you’ve already shelled out for the previous guides, I very much doubt that snake nuts will be able to resist. Curse these insidious Gulf people.

• Mattison’s Keeping and Breeding Snakes The OHS News 83 (Fall 1999)
  Keeping and Breeding Snakes
  by Chris Mattison
  Blandford, 1999. Hardcover, 224 pp. ISBN 0-7137-2709-8

  The first edition of Chris Mattison’s Keeping and Breeding Snakes appeared in 1988. This second, “fully revised” edition is no mere updating of an earlier work; it is essentially an entirely new book. Its emphases have changed and its text — especially its species accounts — has been rewritten. Gone are the tables with breeding information, and the section on keeping venomous snakes has been reduced to almost an afterthought. The new photographs are nothing less than spectacular, in far more vivid colour than in previous Blandford offerings. In all, the package is quite attractive.

  Mattison’s coverage of boas and pythons is very comprehensive, even listing taxa not normally available to the hobby. The exception is his coverage of sand boas, limited to a single species. His coverage of colubrids, in one long chapter, is more uneven, emphasizing the more commonly kept varieties. Rat snake enthusiasts will be very happy with his comprehensive coverage of the genus Elaphe and its allies. The book’s coverage of kingsnakes is less detailed; and only a few, larger subspecies of milk snake are covered, the smaller, “bootlace-sized” subspecies being dismissed as “a waste of time”. Other colubrids get even shorter shrift — a surprising omission is the rough green snake — and several other infrequently kept colubrids present in the first edition have been removed altogether, a decision perhaps understandable if the book is intended for an audience of adult beginners. Still, I wonder why a section on the care of snakes from small families (Typhlopidae, Loxocemidae, Xenopeltidae, Tropidopheidae) was included; surely even glossy snakes (omitted) are more commonly kept than blind snakes (included)! Troubling, too, is the decision to cover only western hognoses, which can feed on mice, without referring to eastern and southern hognoses, which won’t. Mattison makes no mention of the genus’s general toad-feeding preferences, and the omission may confuse a beginner.

  Nevertheless, this book is tremendously useful. The section on general husbandry is thorough and, generally speaking, leaves very little unsaid. In tone and style the book is more appropriate for adult beginners than for children, but even experienced keepers will find Mattison’s refreshing perspective of value. It’s worth having, even if you own the previous edition.

•••

I’ve also written plenty about reptiles online. See my blog entries (also on my previous blog), Gartersnake.info, and Snakes on Film.