Animal roundup (caution: snakes & spiny caterpillar pictures)

Here’s some nice creatures I’ve found recently. They are posted in order of Turtle, Very Spiny Caterpillar, and Venomous Snake, in case you want to manage your exposure, if you’re nervous about certain things.



A box turtle, possibly male, wishing I would go away and leave him alone.

Missouri has only two kinds of box turtles, Three-toed or Ornate. As far as I can tell I’ve only found Three-toeds.  They invariably suck into their shells when I find them so I can’t count their hind toes (that’s what the “Three-toed” part is referring to). Males usually have nice red or orange irises, but that’s not a fool-proof way to sex them. The Ornate ones have contrasting marks on their carapace and plastron, looks pretty obvious in pictures.

I see a turtle just about every single time I go into the woods.

I sure do like the colors on their scales!


Above, Eastern Comma caterpillar, Polygonia comma

There’s this great site, Discoverlife.org, where you can check boxes next to features (body color, spines, tufts, etc.), and it will give you choices that match, so you can figure it out. I mean for anything, plant or animal, bug, etc. Great if you don’t have enough field guides, like me.  “A portal to all living things,” they say. Can’t beat that!



Here’s his head. At first I was worried that he had some icky fungus problem, because it looked like things were growing out of his eyes, but it turns out that’s normal! Just more spines.
Some caterpillars have venomous spines, which eject venom when brushed up against or broken, so I will pretend that all spiny, hairy caterpillars have this, just to be safe. They won’t kill you, but who needs the pain, itching and heartache.

I wondered why they were called “Commas” (there’s “Question Mark” butterflies, too), and it’s all because of the shape of a little white mark on the underside of their wings. Well, whatever works.

Caterpillars are usually very busy and don’t stand still for you to photograph.

Snake image below! Run!



That’s a BABY Copperhead. Even though she looks 3 feet long in this image, she was only about 14” long. Yeah, they’re venomous, but not THAT venomous, and this one was very small, and she had plenty of room to leave, and she wasn’t in any position to strike, and I had to take her picture. And I’m so glad I did, or I would never have noticed her chartreuse tail tip.

There’s an article in the MDC online that’s trying to tell me that young copperheads use that green tail tip as a caudal lure (like those insane deep-sea fishies that wiggle little things in their open mouths to attract prey—and like alligator snapping turtles)—as in, they sit coiled, with their tail tip sticking out, and wiggle it at lizards and things who think it’s a caterpillar and wander over and are nabbed by the copperhead! And that they lose the green tail color by the time they’re about two years old, when they’re big enough to get prey the “regular” way.

I’d love to believe this.

Anyway, here’s her head.


The subtle color shading on those brown hourglass marks on her back remind me of feathers, or butterfly scales. So beautiful. Click on it. The resolution’s not great, though, because I WAS using the zoom (but, I DID lean in, at arm’s length, to about two feet away, while keeping up a chattering stream of reasons why it was okay, to my hiking pal who didn’t even want to look at it—“It’s so small it couldn’t even get a good bite anyway, look, it has plenty of room to get away, they’re not deadly venomous, I’m moving really slowly, it could never bite through my Carhartts.” etc., etc.).

Missouri’s got five venomous snakes, and they all have vertical pupils in normal daylight (but not every venomous snake everywhere has vertical pupils, so don’t get too full of yourself) because they’re all pit vipers. Please don’t make me go read up on that too. Just know that in Missouri, all the venomous snakes are in the pit viper family and they’ve all got vertical pupils (except in the dark, when they can round out considerably). Unless somebody’s captive exotic venomous snake got loose. Or snakes from other states are migrating here.

I think the combination of their vertical slit pupils, and the way the scales on their heads are arranged, makes them look crabby.

So, in between all the mushrooms, there’s all kinds of other cool stuff out there!

Hericium erinaceus in the same spot as last year

Even though it's been distressingly DRY here, starting in late September (the absolute worst time for a stretch of no rain to start, in terms of fall mushrooms), they're still out there, in particular the ones that grow on trees (alive or dead). So, since I'm a "there's got to be a pony in here somewhere" type, I went for a hike, to see if, by some wild chance, there was a Lion's Mane growing where we found two (and a waterlogged one in the stream) last year.

There was!

See them, glowing white, right in the middle of the photo above?

About the size of a decent grapefruit. There's a penny balanced on top of the one furthest left (I put it there).

I was there a week earlier, and the smallest one was there, but not the two bigger ones. The little one was maybe 2", and truly no sign at all of the bigger ones. So I was absolutely delighted to find these guys when I came back.

Besides the fact that they taste like lobster or scallops, well, just look at them.
Here, I'll help you.