Catching Up!

A lot has changed in our lives since my last post.  I guess that's understandable since it has been almost seven years.  I started a new job in 2014, Jenna quit hers, and we moved to Perryville, Missouri.  While there we had our first child, whom we lovingly refer to as, "Squirrel."  We moved back to central Missouri at the end of 2016, and had our second child.  She answers best to, "Bug."  I had big plans to explore southeast Missouri while I was in that part of the state, but an infant has a way of changing plans.  I did find a great place for spring salamander migration.  Literally thousands of Tiger and Spotted Salamanders. It is beautiful county down there, and I miss it.

We have made a couple trips to the swamps of southeast Missouri since moving back.  In all the time down there, we really wanted to find a Mud Snake, but were never successful.  Jenna took Squirrel to the movies one day.  While bug and I were at home, I looked at the weather, and saw the impending storms for the boot heel.  I texted back and forth with Jenna for a bit, and within half an hour we had a hotel room booked.  The bags were mostly packed when they got home from the movie, and we started the four hour drive.  As we were cruising gravel roads around the swamps, the storms were getting close.  I spotted a dark object in the road in front of us.  Mud Snake!!!  A very similar experience happened earlier this year when we made a spur of the moment trip based on the weather.  Another Mud Snake.

Western Mud Snake (Farancia abacura)

We've made three trips to Arizona, one trip to Florida, one trip through Louisiana and east Texas, one trip to northern Montana, a winter birding trip to Minnesota (think -36°F actual temperature), and two trips to Kansas (our first trip resulted in 435 snakes in 3 days), and a mostly sight-seeing trip to the Washington D.C. area.  Jenna and her friend Lisa also spent a week exploring Utah.  We've seen some amazing things and made some amazing memories.  I hope to keep a little more updated with this, because there area  lot of experiences I would like to share, but I just don't have the time to recall everything.  I'll post just a few of the thousands of my photos here to try and cover a couple highlights (in no certain order).