Our first stop was a rocky, wooded hillside with a nice southeastern exposure. The sun was blazing down out of a cloudless sky, and the thermometer was climbing thru the seventies. Within a minute or two we had our first snake, an adult Cottonmouth tucked halfway under a rock.

A few feet further on I spotted another moccasin, this one a subadult, basking between a rock and a log.. When I angled around to take a picture, I saw another, last year's neonate, wedged in close to the rock.

Three snakes in as many minutes - but things were just getting started. Close by, two adult Cottonmouths basked from a pile of leaves along the edge of an outcrop. The three of us were somewhat separated, and all of us were spotting basking trapjaws and singing out - "here's another one!" None of us got pictures of all of the snakes, and a lot of them were covered with a thin film of dried mud. Perhaps this was a day of emergence from winter dens.

Our snake odyssey was punctuated with the appearance of a few salamanders - Slimy Salamanders and Plethodon serratus, the Southern Redback. I took a few pictures but the conditions were not optimal for photographing caudates.

Swinging around the hillside to the south, Jim spotted a rock outcrop with a number of adult moccasins parked outside. There were at least four, and most were aware of our presence. We stood off and took some pictures, with a couple of snakes hanging around a bit longer. About this time we started to keep a count of the Cottonmouths we were finding. Jeff was up the hill twenty feet or so, and found another completely concealed in the leaf litter. It moved when he rested his snake hook on it. I came up to photograph this snake, as the upper palate had a number of linguatulid parasites attached.