Germany and French border 2013 [complete]

[Guillaume Gomard]

Some pics from Germany from the last couple of weeks. Not really a good weather so far, but still OK for amphibians and some brave reptiles

[Guillaume Gomard]

Some pictures now from the French side taken 1 week ago. After a week of rain and bad weather, my friend P.Wolf and I have decided to look for vipers during a long, sunny and successful day. My goal was not only to observe them (which is quite difficult now because of the high vegetation), but also to initiate a follow-up of the populations visited. I am therefore gathering as much information as possible during this season (including sex, location, approximate length, etc.), which is something that I never did before so systematically.

The highlight of the day:

Guillaume

[Jürgen Gebhart]

French side, two of my favourite herps of Europe, love it!

[Daniel Kane]

Those two female bilineatas are a brilliant shade of green! Nice viper shots too. Best of luck with your study, Guillaume.

[Mario Schweiger]

Your "highlight" is really an eyecatcher
Mario

[Alexandre Roux]

I wish one day will be Emys orbicularis on these kind of pictures... Not Trachemys scripta.
Very nice Asp viper as well !

[Francesco Tri]

The picture with the two viper heads, the best pic of the year!!!

[Guillaume Gomard]

Thank you all for your comments

Some recent pics taken at the same spot as in the last thread. It was globally harder to observe vipers because the vegetation is now covering all the basking spots I know, and also because the summer finally arrived and therefore the vipers are only exposed in the morning.

A good-looking Podarcis:

An already observed aspis, here in "blue phase":

I found again one of the vipers which were mating in April (see this topic, 1rst page)

In the afternoon, I visited another place at a higher altitude (around 1000 m a.s.l). This area was full of tadpoles, Ichthyosaura and unfortunately, full of leeches too!

Guillaume

[Jürgen Gebhart]

The zootoca get a second head! What a huge Tick!

The second Asp is beautyful!

[Guillaume Gomard]

A new update gathering a selection of pictures taken during end of May/June and exclusively in Germany. I finally took the time to plan sessions in the north of the Black Forest in the search of V.berus. The first session took place in end of May and I arrived at the place at around 9 a.m. It was really cloudy with a heavy fog (the ground was really wet too) but starting 11 a.m the sky was clear and I could find within 3 hours 5 black adders:

Back to areas close to my place now, a.k.a the "German Toscana" ( ) with pictures of amphibians. At this time of the year it's really great to observe the ongoing evolution of the new generations:

Another herping session was done last week-end, still in the north of the Black Forest, but this time with Andre S. We started to look for V.berus at around 8 a.m and found the first one few minutes later at a known spot. All in all, we could find 6 adders (including one which was not black, the last of the day!) by investigating most of the area of interest. Two adders were observed in motion, one pretty slow found by Andre in the early morning and another one found by myself 2 or 3 hours later. It can be precised that we did not find many Zootoca vivipara during this session. It was a great morning but at around 11 a.m, everywhere we went there were ticks attacking our pants So when we found more ticks than adders we decided to stop the session, which was a reasonable decision.

I assume that the number of observations will now slow down a little bit as far as I am concerned. Depending on the weather and the number of ticks, I would like to look again in Black Forest during this summer. If not possible, I will investigate this place for sure at the beginning of September

Guillaume