Pelee island trip

[SDSnakes]

For those of you who didn't make it, hate to say it, YOU MISSED
OUT! The bad news is, i have a sunburn. I'll get some pics up
over the next few days, hopefully BJ gets her journal up also.
Thanks for a good weekend Jeff and crew.

Jamie and Crystal

Nasty_monkey69@hotmail.com

[reptiguy123]

Nice e-mail address.

[ont_herper]

Hey,

It was nice meeting ya'll, hopefully we'll all meet up again sometime. Thanks Jeff for all the time and effort you put into organizing the weekend, next time I'll let ya know that I'm coming haha.

I would just like to point out again that I caught a Blue Racer on my first trip to the Island with the group and helped lead the way to a new number of Fox Snake's in 1 day record hahaha. I had an awesome time and will be there for sure if you do it again next year. I would like to see the total number of snakes seen and hear about what happened Monday if anything.

Also thought I'd tell you about my interesting trip home. The locals are wrong you don't want to be on the small ferry in a storm, within minutes of it leaving the dock people were grabbing the barf bags. They had to chain down the cars because they were being thrown around, the ferry was actuly geting launched into the air so much that you were often thrown out of your seat. For the first 30 minutes debris was flying around inside and numerous people throwing up, luckily all did it over the side or into the proper bags haha. The storm was so intense the ferry had to take a 30 min detour because it could hardly handle the waves. Although I felt sick after a while it was awesome watching the lightining over the lake. The drive was also fun, at times I could only see a few feet in front of the car, and at times hydroplaned through puddles over 20 feet long.

Dan

[Jeff Hathaway]

Well, it certainly was a great weekend! Rain at night, sun during the day, and lots of snakes! There is no really accurate count, but based on the numbers found during the survey of the Wilds of Pelee property (~300) plus our various outings, I would say that we were easily over 500 snakes for the weekend for the whole group. We did find a couple of blue racers, but perhaps even more interesting was the sheer number of fox snakes- 24 by the time we left for the ferry, and I hear that Jordan saw another one the next day! 13 (our previous weekend best) on the first day alone, just on the centre property! Though it could just be lucky, I think this is an indication that the habitat features we have helped to build there over the last few years are working. On Sunday, we got 13 species- the only herp we missed seeing that is reasonably possible was the common map turtle.

Of course, we got a lot of projects done too, including collecting reeds for a thatched roof, planting/staking trees, removing other trees from a restoration area, and digging the hole for the foundation of the chicken coop.

Thanks, everyone, for your efforts. I hope everyone had a good time, and hopefully we will do it again next year!

Jeff Hathaway
Sciensational Sssnakes!!