by Thomas Bader » Wed Aug 10, 2011 7:31 pm
Thank's guys - the area, where we travelled, is absolutely a "no go" for beach tourists. All recent Turkish herp - reports I have read, treated more or less the area covered in the book of Franzen et al. Our westernmost visited area (Göksü Delta) contained more or less the species covered in this book. But a bit more to the East where so many distribution borders in terms of Herpetofauna exist - like the Anatolian diagonal, the Syrian Fracture zone or the Euphrates, lime stone changes with volcanic rocks etc. - you can find completely different species mixture within a very limited area. Unfortunately we couldn't manage to go to the Tigris area, which should be a bit more natural than the Euphrates (but how long?), - Timon princeps is on my personal wish list.
I guess our species list is not 100% complete and if you check, how many species we missed, it is really a shame. Unfortunately time was the limiting factor and we didn't want to miss neither Neurergus nor Cappadocia... And we had really bad (heavy rain) weather for some days, which of course is not only bad, but for two days we could hardly find anything. I can only recommend the area - people are friendly, food tastes well and beer is also ok. Prices are cheap except for fuel (for those, who cannot understand the German text)
Thomas