More Photo Time

I'm seriously lacking in inspiration today. I feel like I had a post in mind last night, but it's slipped away like quicksilver since then.

What I do have are photos, so let's look at a few of those.

First up, we have your common snapping turtle. Don't worry about the red mark. It's just fingernail polish. Cheap and easy way to identify recaptures. I have about a dozen photos of snappers from a stint over the summer trapping turtles, and that's the only one with its mouth shut. Of course, with its mouth shut, how can it bite unwary fingers off? It can't, which suits me right down to the ground.

Really the hardest part about dealing with snappers was getting them out of the hoop nets. They all like to grab hold of the net with their claws. You get one foot free, start on another, and they get that first one hooked again. The whole time you're trying to keep away from their mouth.

This other one is a juvenile hognosed snake. I showed you one the last time we did photo fun. This one's colored differently because it's in a sand prairie (such as there is around here), instead of in the woods. Different soil, different plants, different circumstances, meaning different requirements to blend in. You know how it goes. This one did the hood thing as I was trying to get it out of the trap, and it actually sort of worked. It didn't make the snake look bigger necessarily, but it made the shape of its head resemble that of a viper, a copperhead or something equivalent. Which gave us a use for the terrarium we brought. I'm not dumping a snake of indeterminate type directly into my hand, gloves or no.