We encountered an old friend wiggling across a sandy road, a Midland Brown Snake (Storeria dekayi wrightorum).  These snakes are normally denizens of low, wet habitats, so I was a bit surprised to see one in what I would consider a dry, well-drained area.  As with most other reptiles, there's more to Storeria than meets the eye - snakes are where you find them, and any detailed speculation will just make your head hurt!

Rescuing an Ornate Box Turtle (Terrapene ornata ornata) off a blacktop road served as the last herp sighting of the day.  In Illinois, the Ornate Box is a resident of the sand prairies; it scrapes a shallow hole under the shade of a bush or tree, and spends the hot hours of the day there.  The hole is deep enough to reach the moister layers of earth or sand, and thus serves as a humid microclimate.  These turtle "scrapes" allow the Ornate to survive in the hot and dry sand prairies.  

Early September found us back at the dump.  Rick flipped a piece of corrugated tin to uncover a thirty inch male Bullsnake, which huffed and puffed, hissed and rattled its tail furiously during capture and examination.  The size difference between a fully "inflated" and "deflated" Bullsnake is amazing.  The hissing is part of an elaborate defense posture - the snake throws a loop of its body out in front, draws the head back in an S-shaped "strike coil", while fiercely inhaling and exhaling, the hissing produced by a modification to the epiglottis.  The whole effect is a mimicry of a rattlesnake in a striking coil.  The snake may strike, and it may open its mouth wide as it does so, again in imitation of a rattler striking.

The other end of the dump was reached without another find.  I poked around in a clump of sumac beyond the dump's edge, and came across a four foot female Bullsnake, out for a leisurely crawl.  I picked this snake up, and it never hissed, struck, or rattled its tail.  This snake lacked any brown coloration, being black and grey on a white background, resembling a Northern Pine Snake (Pituophis melanoleucus melanoleucus).  I was happy to find one myself, and what a beauty she was!

Driving out one of the sand roads back to the blacktop, a serpentine shape wriggled in the sand just ahead of us.  I quickly jumped out of the truck and slapped my hands down on a Glass Lizard, and by doing so realized that holding them down was much more effective than trying to grab them.  We took some photos and then let it go, and it quickly wriggled off into the brush.  It was a fitting end to our Iroquois odyssey.

All in all, the sand country had been good to us.  We had found a number of new species on just a few trips, and I had realized one of my boyhood dreams by finding several Bullsnakes, one of the giant snakes of the American landscape.  Along the way, we managed to learn a few things about the ecology of these sand prairies, and had managed to learn the names of a few more flowers, plants, and trees.

Two years passed before we made it back up to bullsnake country. We found France's trailer deserted, and almost hidden from the road by tall weeds.  The dump across the way was gone as well - the land scraped clean of its trash and junk, "NO TRESPASSING" signs posted.  No dogs wandered up the road to greet us and steal lunches.  France's absence, for good or bad, and the disappearance of our favorite trashpile left us saddened.  We would find other places to snake hunt here in sand country, but they would pale in comparison to this area.  The Bullsnakes remain, nonetheless!