After hauling ourselves and our gear out of the swamp, we still had plenty of daylight left.  What to do?  We wanted to head south and west down into Florida, towards the Apalachicola area.  Rather than jump on I-10 and get over there quickly, we decided to take the two-lane back roads and look for places to herp along the way.  As I had mentioned earlier, the property surrounding the swamp was kept rather neat and tidy, and so once again we had trouble finding good places to herp.  We found a state park to camp at for the evening.  Poking around the campsite yielded a few Ground Skinks and a Pine Woods Treefrog,  and the camp restrooms provided residence for Green Treefrogs.  After dark I had fun checking out the moths attracted to the bathroom lights, and managed to photograph a stunning Rosy Maple Moth among other finds.  Here's some advice - folks aren't too crazy about people waving cameras around campground bathrooms; tell 'em up front that you're taking pictures of insects!

The next morning was again sunny and pleasant. Our first stop was in Big Gum Swamp, situated in Florida just south of Okefenokee.  We hiked down a little trail into a wet pine and palmetto forest, which was apparently wet most of the time since the ground underfoot was covered with living sphagnum moss.  After a time our first herp was sitting in the middle of the trail - an adult Florida Box Turtle.  This poor turtle was being assaulted by mosquitoes from the air, and ants from the ground; life is hard in the low wet places.  There were a lot of large chunks of pine bark strewn about the trail, and after looking under what seemed like several hundred pieces, we finally turned up a nice Southern Ringneck Snake.  Not bad for thirty minutes of hiking - two new species for us all!

We moved on to the west, keeping our eyes open for likely spots to herp - junk piles, abandoned homesteads, even a piece of plywood or two along the road.  After lunch we struck it big, spotting a large pile of trash and boards in the middle of an old field, with several abandoned trailers behind.  We pulled into the adjacent dirt road, and as we pulled closer we could see all manner of junk surrounding the trailers as well.   Given the terrible condition of the old mobile homes, we had assumed they were abandoned, but shortly after we pulled up the folks who lived there arrived in a beat up old car.  We explained what we were looking for, and as it usually goes we were granted permission to poke around and 'take whatever snakes you find'.

There was a lot of poking around to do, with all of the plywood, metal, plastic siding, appliances and you-name-it strewn over a half acre.  Fence lizards and ground skinks scurried as we lifted things, but we were after bigger game, and surely the sheer amount of cover material here would yield us something interesting.  I spotted a large section of an old above-ground metal swimming pool, and as I approached to lift it up my eyes suddenly focused on the large fallen tree branch laying on top of it.  Curled up in the branches was a large Gray Rat Snake, a beautiful specimen in excess of five feet!  Here was another new species for us, and an impressive one to boot.  Rather than immediately pick it up, we photographed it in place first.

That snake was it for a junk pile that took three of us nearly an hour to cover.  That's the way it goes sometimes - more junk does not necessarily mean more snakes!