Spring, feeling like summer, has popped out of nowhere, pushing the clouds away and drying out the ground. There are still puddles here and there, but it's actually possible to sit down in the woods without getting a butt full of mud.
The snake in the photo is one of my favorite local snakes, a Ringneck snake. They don't get much bigger than a pencil, but they are beautiful and velvety smoothe to the touch. This one was hiding under a board in the garden, and was one of three different kinds of snakes we came across this week. I saw a total of six Garter snakes, one of them dead on the road, and two California Kingsnakes, or more accurately 1.2 Kingsnakes because one of them was just a small section of Kingsnake left behind by some larger predator. The live Kingsnake was hiding under some rocks by the reservoir, and despite about twenty minutes of carefully digging and moving rocks on my part, remained hiding under the rocks, no doubt sticking out its little forked tongue at me from the shadows as I gave up. The sudden warmth really sapped the campers' energy as well, leaving them whiny and lethargic as we hiked to and from the reservoir. They rallied a bit whenever we found some new reptile (Garter snake, Skink, Alligator lizard...) but then went back to complaining of tiredness.
Okay, time to get off the computer and do something more useful...
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