We road-cruised that night, but could only turn up a few DOR Texas Rats.  The next morning, we got up early and headed south to work around the Houston area.  We stopped along the way at a junk spot near the Trinity River, and had some success!  We flipped a sub-adult Eastern Coachwhip (Masticophis flagellum flagellum) and a juvenile Western Cottonmouth (Agkistrodon piscivorus leucostoma).  Another cool find was a Rio Grande Chirping Frog (Eleutherodactylus cystignathoides campi).  This little frog is spreading north along the Texas coast, probably in landscaping plants, and was a lifer for me.

The day was just starting to get some heat to it when we stopped to work a string of junk piles.  Within a few short minutes, Jim lifted up a small board and found the object of our quest, a Buttermilk Racer!  It was a gorgeous one too. looking much like the one in Conant's field guide that I had been staring at since I was twelve.

We bagged the Buttermilk and found a shady place to take pictures and examine the serpent in detail.  This snake looked like a paint-by-number project in the hands of the madman.  The semi-random juxtaposition of white scales and light blue scales are completely different from any other snake in North America.  The venter is a pale white, save for a splash of yellow up near the head.  This snake was beautiful and strange-looking at the same time.

After releasing the snake at its point of capture, we continued our trash pile herping, and turned up a subadult Buttermilk!  This snake only had a small amount of white scales, and if you disregarded those, it looked pretty much like any other Southern Black Racer.  I named it the Two Per Cent Buttermilk Racer.

We had found our target species but kept on herping into the evening.  A pile of carpet yielded a nice Gulf Coast Ribbon Snake (Thamnophis proximus orarius), and the evening's road cruising turned up a few nice Southern Copperheads.