Almost every month, we take a walk at the preserve along with whoever signs up to come along with us to get to “know our nature neighbors.” The idea is to notice, talk about, and document the oaks, yucca, wildflowers, dragonflies, turtles, herons, and anything else. Today was the fifth walk we have offered and it proved that each walk is unique and wonderful. It’s never boring!
A little before 8:00am it was 76 degrees and a thin cloud cover helped keep the temperature mild throughout the walk. Four folks joined me in a walk that started at the south pond along the boardwalk and fishing pier. Just off the boardwalk we found a small hole in the soil near the pond’s edge with scattered cream-colored eggshells.
A number of turtles – river cooters and red-eared sliders – live in this pond. Today we saw a couple of turtles including a river cooter swimming near the fishing pier. Each year the female turtles search for a good place to lay eggs, and one of them dug a nest here and laid several eggs. She probably released some stored water to moisten the ground and she covered the eggs with loose soil. If this was a red-eared slider nest, the eggs might have been laid as late as last month and left to be warmed by the sun and moistened by any summer rain. The eggs incubate for roughly a couple of months, but a predator, quite possibly a raccoon, interrupted this process. Many turtle nests are lost to raccoons.
We also noticed a green heron foraging in alligatorweed near the pond’s edge. They’re pretty common in this area, without the long wading legs of egrets or great blue herons. They usually look like a dark, hunched bird, not particularly green, patiently waiting for a small fish to get close enough to be grabbed or speared.
As we started to leave, we found a young rough green snake cruising through branches of a cedar elm tree at about head height. These might be our most common snakes at the preserve, and I have yet to find anyone who doesn’t like them. They are lime-green, slender and graceful, and they feed on spiders, caterpillars, and insects. In my experience they virtually never bite, even when captured, and they have tiny teeth and no venom. We held and examined this young snake, possibly less than a year old, and then let it go. Adults of this species are usually about two to three feet in length, and they are hard to see in vegetation because they look so much like vines.
As we explored, we found numerous examples of the tornado-shaped webs of funnel web spiders in the family Agelenidae. Sometimes there is some confusion because in Australia there are unrelated spiders that weave funnel webs and the bites of some of those spiders is medically serious. Ours should be considered harmless, and today they were all shy and staying hidden down in those funnel tubes.
We made our way up to the bluff overlook, talking about the oaks and the plants that grow in the sandy openings. One of those is the Glen Rose yucca, which also grows in the sandy meadow at the eastern edge of the preserve. Among the various yucca species, this one is a north Texas endemic, meaning that it is only found in a restricted area (Tarrant, Hood, Somervell, and Parker counties).
As we walked around the top of the hill, we came upon a shed snake skin. The snake might have been several feet long, but what was left was a section around a foot or so long. Here was a cool challenge! I examined the size and shape of the scales and looked for evidence of the pattern and shading of the scales. The scales of the back were smooth, without the ridge or keel that would be found on some snakes’ scales, like the western ratsnake. They were also fairly large, so that if you counted rows of scales across the snake’s back, there would be relatively few rows. The belly scales might have had some traces of mottling along the edges, such as we would see on the belly of a coachwhip. To my eyes, it looked like the forward edges of scales were relatively lighter, shading to a bit darker on the trailing edges.
Altogether, there was some evidence that this was a western coachwhip, possibly even the same snake seen last weekend by Rosealin Delgado. I cannot be sure, but it’s an interesting possibility because it would suggest that the snake might be living here, not just passing through.
We had so much fun that we ran a little overtime, ending at about 10:30am. There’s just so much to see, and I hope you’ll consider coming along on the next one.
