Twoton's Pitcher Post

Monday, August 1, 2011

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Another Year, Another Cherry Season

And I live right inside Cherry Central (Sanchih/三芝) - these photos were taken just across the road from my house....

Monday, November 15, 2010

Pangolin - The Armor That Burrows Through The Mountain

I think I'm not too far off the truth when I say that few of us have ever seen a pangolin, and until last Saturday night around 2030 hours, that included me.

I was lying in bed, reading Thomas E. Ricks' "Fiasco - The American Military Adventure in Iraq", when the phone rang downstairs in the living room. I heard one of the kids pick up, and half a minute later both boys erupted into joyous ululations, yelling up the stairs "DAAAAD! GET DRESSED AND COME DOWN, QUICK! THE NEIGHBORS CAUGHT A PANGOLIN AND WANT TO GIVE IT TO US!!"

It took me a while to extricate my brain from the sticky cobwebs in which all those complex politics and military operations in the Middle East had thoroughly shrouded it, and tried to recalibrate it for use on the matter at hand. A pangolin? Shyeeeaahh. Right. Spitting cobras fly out of my butt, and Martian storm troopers are bivouacking in my ghetto blaster. I was convinced I had misheard, and reckoned the neighbors were actually bringing over pomelos or home-made dumplings, as they often do, or maybe a present for Hans' twelfth birthday today. But the inquiry I yelled back down the stairs while trying to pull on my britches without tripping over them still brought back the same message: the neighbors had found a pangolin, and did we want it, us being known snake catchers and all?

Wow. TRIPLE wow! You see, as crazy as I am about snakes, I'll gladly trade three of my cobras for one of your pangolins any day of the week. I have night-herped Taiwan's mountains extensively for two years and never ever seen a pangolin, not even a single scale. I managed to put on my shoes without strangling myself with the laces, and then my entire family accompanied me across the street to the neighbor's yard. There on the ground stood a blue wire cage for dogs, containing not a poodle, but one of the oddest creatures I have ever had the pleasure to lay eyes on.

As a long-time resident of Taiwan, I actually knew quite a bit about Chinese pangolins and had seen countless pictures, but never the animal itself. Until 1990, when Manis p. pentadactyla was put under strict protection, the natives used to catch these animals to use their scales in Chinese medicine and their meat in Chinese cuisine. All pangolin species are reportedly very tasty; and the African pangolins are very popular bushmeat. The "Armor that Burrows Through The Mountain" (穿山甲), as the Chinese call the animal, still falls prey to poachers here in Taiwan, but nowadays Taiwanese pangolins don't end up in local woks anymore, but are instead smuggled to Mainland China where they command top dollar.

Chinese pangolins spend their nights prowling lowland forests for ants and termites, and their days sleeping in self-dug underground burrows. Legend has it that they roll around in ant nests, trapping the insects under their movable armor scales. They then find a creek or pond, submerge and relax their scales. This forces the ants to the surface where the pangolin's tongue laps them up. Wikipedia has more:

Pangolins have large keratin scales covering their skin and are the only mammals with this adaptation. They are found in tropical regions of Africa and Asia. The name "pangolin" derives from the Malay word pengguling ("something that rolls up"). Pangolins lack teeth and the ability to chew. Instead, they tear open anthills or termite mounds with their powerful front claws and probe deep into them with their very long tongues. Pangolins have glands in their chests to lubricate the tongue with sticky, ant-catching saliva.

In case you're wondering where they put all that tongue - it retracts right down into the abdominal cavity, at or near the pelvis (no uncouth jokes, please.) Thanks to an anal gland similar to the model found in skunks, pangolins can give off a monstrously hideous stink, but this little guy, a rather young individual, just smelled of earth and dirt. Picking him up did not always cause him to roll up into a ball, whereas touching his surprisingly soft and hairy belly and palms did so without fail.

The main reason for my intense excitement at finally coming face to face with one of these "Old World Armadillos" (to which they're actually not at all related) is not so much their rarity or their weirdly cute appearance, but their ancientness. This is a living fossil, an animal that has not changed one iota for at least 56 million years. Compounding the awesome sensation of observing a genetic witness to prehistory is the fact that all these deliciously freaky features - the scales, the tongue, the toothless mouth, the über-specialized lifestyle - have actually survived those endless eons without a single major mutation, while the rest of the planet's fauna evolved into the furry hunters and grazers we commonly associate with the term "mammal".

Apart from all that, pangolins are also bona fide archetypes of antediluvian adorability, i. e. terribly cute. The next morning we took the ant fiend out of the dog cage and brought it to a spacious private garden featuring a lawn and large decorative rocks which I planned to use for backgrounds. The pangolin is such a docile creature that we didn't even bother with caging or bagging it for the short ride - the boys just held it on their laps, where it snored contentedly, snot dripping out of its little pink nose. At the garden I discovered that this docility does not readily translate into willingness to be photographed. As soon as we had placed the still bunched-up critter on the ground, it tentatively started to sniff and look around, and once we had stepped back about five feet, it unwrapped itself and took off across the lawn at quite an impressive clip. Photographing the creature in its rolled-out state seemed impossible, and the strategy of placing it on top of a large rock in the hope that it would not dare to jump off failed miserably: trusting his scales to dampen the impact, it ran straight for the edge, hurled itself off the precipice and hit the (fortunately muddy) ground tumbling, stumbling, and finally running. In the end, we discovered a large, artsy birdbath into which we lowered the animal. In the tub it immediately started to look for an exit, which afforded me a few shots of its active state, if only from above.

In the afternoon, we showed the primordial beast to Hans' birthday guests. Ten awe-hushed sixth-graders standing in a circle around the animal created second thoughts about escape. However, the pangolin didn't seem to want to curl up and sulk either; it only seems to do that if someone approaches within touching distance. So it just swung its neckless head here and there, walked around at a slow gait (on his knuckles - how freaky is that?), and I finally got a few proper shots of it in motion.

That night, we released the little pineapple pinscher at a remote place in the mountains. He wasn't well: dripping profusely from the nose, watery eyes, and since I can't imagine any vet here knowing anything about these walking pine cones, we released him in the hope that he'll dig himself a nice burrow and sleep through his cold before it gets worse.

CLICK ON PHOTOS FOR LARGER VERSION

Footnote: Further and very detailed reading on the status and natural history of Manis pentadactyla can be found here...

Saturday, June 12, 2010

New FHF Posts So Far

Here are the links to all the photo threads I've started so far on the NEW fieldherpforum.com

Sparkling Habu

Red Bamboo Ratsnake (O. p. kawakamii)

Enhydris chinensis - Chinese Water Snake

KraitZilla, Part One

Taiwan Trash Snakes, Part 1: Dinodon rufozonatum

Habu & Owl - A Taiwan Adventure

The Curious False Viper

Minimalist Krait

Green Day Vipers

Sleeping Greater Green

Dinodon eating Bufo

Big Fat Chinese Cobra - AT LAST!!!

Stinky Kings and Herping Clowns

Snakes On A Plate, Part II: Ptyas dhumnades

Russell's Viper (warning, crappy pix!)

Chinese Cobra & Little Twotons

Endemic Taiwan Elapid - Sinomicrurus hatori

An Indian Cobra in the Taiwanese Woods

Snakes On A Plate III: World's Most Beautiful Snake Belly?

Large Ptyas dhumnades

Two Greater Green Snakes (Cyclophiops major)

Rain Krait

One Man's Trash (Boiga kraepelini)

MacClelland's Coral Snake - Ecstasy & Tragedy

The Cobra That Hijacked The Camera Bag

Itsy Bitsy Baby Cobra

Ptyas dhumnades - Educating The Masses

Two Blackheads, One Orange

Mad Cobra At Night, Herper's Delight

Unruly Many-Banded Baby Krait

Psammodynastes pulverulentus - (Wannabe) Badass Ruler of the Sands

Green is Good; Greater Green is Better

FBK (Frickin' Big Krait)

Hello Kitty Cobra

Donald,the Chinese Pearl Snake

Orange-Red Bamboo Ratsnake

Scavenging Bamboo Viper

Horrible Habu, Heroically Hooked!

Pangolin - "The Armor That Burrows Through The Mountain"

Dark Mock Viper

Seriously Overfed Taiwan Pitviper Baby

Taiwan Gringo Herping, Part 1: Taiwan Beauty Snake

Taiwan Gringo Herping, Part 2: The Other Snakes

Big Fat Taiwan Herping Vacation!

Habu Baby - Baby Habu

Bitten By A Dinosaur

Greening The Planet, One Snake at A Time

Diurnal Pitviper Surprise

Extra-Cool Bamboo Viper Mimic!

Super Mom Pit Viper (Protobothrops)

Friday, March 12, 2010

Herper's Ball, Taiwan Style

Mr. Onionsack, the man in these images, was so nice as to put this together....

Sunday, February 28, 2010

SNAKESOFTAIWAN.COM finally ONLINE!

Ladies and gentlefolk,

I'm proud to announce that after six months of gruesome toil, our long-awaited website SNAKES OF TAIWAN has finally gone online.

This website was conceived out of a need for complete, one-stop information on the snakes of Taiwan. Before we created this site, the only comparable resources were a number of field guides in Chinese, most of them outdated. Similar material in English did not exist at all.

With this site we hope to provide exhaustive and current knowledge in both languages: tons of photos and videos from the field, taxonomic descriptions, info on biology, ecology, distribution, etymology, toxicology and more - and if that's not enough, there are copious links to even more information on the Web.

The site is organized like a field guide, i.e., all species on the main menu are arranged by colors and patterns rather than in alphabetical order. This facilitates quick identification of any snakes you might encounter in the wilds of Taiwan.

Mr. Onionsack and I, the authors of this site, are not professional herpetologists, just two average guys with a strong infatuation for Taiwan's serpentofauna. We have researched and now present the information on this site to the best of our knowledge and abilities. If you spot any mistakes, errors, blunders, bloopers, typos, or maybe just have a comment or two, or want to link to your site with our banner, we would love to hear from you - please drop me a note!

Thank you very much in advance for your help and your patronage!

Cheers

Hans
PS: The Chinese part is still being translated and will go online in March - we'll let you know when it's done :-)

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Mammals Suck At Ambush Hunting?

Guess the sit-and-wait approach just doesn't work for endotherms, as these two images prove.

(Pearls Before Swine, 2/9/10; copyright Stephen Pastis)

Friday, January 1, 2010

Flickr: Snakes Eating in the Wild

Twelve pages of images of one of the Holy Grails of field herping.....there's videos, too.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Snake Talks in Schools: Media Update

The media are taking note. Two cable news stations have reported so far, one more to come tomorrow, and the second-largest newspaper ran a piece on my snake classes today.

Here's one of the TV news reports online:

Part One

Part Two

Happy Christmas from (relatively) Christmas-free Taiwan!

Sunday, December 20, 2009

An Approach to Fear of Snakes

I talk about ophidiophobia during my snake lectures in elementary schools (there are always some kids who display it). I tell them I know some of them fear snakes, and that it's OK, because phobias are normal. I tell them I'm not afraid of having any "disgusting" animal walk all over my body, including tarantulas, cockroaches and millipedes. I ramp up the excitement listing these eeew-y animals that I don't fear at all, eeeew-ing the students out to the max....and then I put the needle to the balloon: "But you know what I really AM afraid of? Flying. I become a pant-wetting wreck as soon as the plane takes off." (Well, it's not THAT bad, but "Chief Whiteknuckle" is one of my nicknames). That results in much head-shaking and giggling, because for most kids, sitting in an airplane is boring at best, not a cause for utter terror. Then I continue "And you know why? No? Me neither. It's all in the head, and it's something you need to identify as irrational and then fight it, because phobias mess up your lives"

That usually makes them think . "Wow, that big man with the six-foot snake around his neck, the guy who seeks out kraits and pitvipers in the dark of night, and takes close-up photos of them.....he actually FEARS something, and something that silly at that?"

Sunday, August 16, 2009

FHF Posts so Far

Here are the links to all the photo threads I've started so far on fieldherpforum.com

Howdy from Taiwan

First Photo Encounter with a Bamboo Viper

Herping Taiwan on Jason Voorhees Night (DUW)

Daytime Chinese Soft-shell Turtle

Taiwan Slug Snake (Pareas formosensis)

Taiwan Habu, Chinese Tree Toad, and other ugly pix

Thar's Snakes In Them Thar Sakuras! (Pareas formosensis)

Bankoro Toad and Swinhoe's Frog

Bugs & Flowers

More crawlies from the Taiwanese woods

Tree Snake Babies, Walking Sticks and Fishing Spiders

TwoTon's Terror Tooth, Tree Toad & Takydromus Trifecta

JACKPOT - Taiwan's prettiest and rarest pitviper!

Snakes on a Scooter, or Boigas on a Bike

My First Live Krait!

CruisinArt....or is it?

The Hundred-Pacer That Wasn't - A Tale from Taiwan

Formosan Dino Sex Show

Beautiful Taiwan Kukri Snake

MacClelland’s (Asian) Coral Snake

Two Taiwan Habus

Bamboo Viper vs. Tree Frog

Finally, an adult Habu in the open

Dinodon eating Toad

Water Wall Krait

DOR Chinese Cobra

Another Day, Another Green Tree Viper

Lots of Sundry Taiwan Snakes & Frogs & Stuff & Such

High Noon at the (Asian) Rat Snake Corral

Red Bamboo Rat Snakes

Big Habu

Nother Krait and a few photo tech questions

Whole Bunch of Taiwan Herps & Inverts

Big Fat Stinking Goddess (Elaphe carinata)

Another Stinking Goddess…in my backpack!

Green Tree Viper Potpourri

THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING! and other Taiwan Snake Sightings

Snake & Turtle Temple

Tree viper – actually IN A TREE this time!

Bunker-Guarding Pitviper

Close Encounter of the Third Krait

White Plum Blossom Snake

False Taiwan Habu

Two more False Taiwan Habus

Mock Viper (Psammodynastes pulverulentus)

King of the Ditch - Sauter's Water/Grass Snake

Asiatic Many-toothed Snake (Sybinophis chinensis chinensis)

Northern Taiwan - Huge Habitat Post

Where's Waldo (the Pitviper)?

The Fastest Snake in the East (Zaocys dhumnades)

Green Tree Viper Potpourri, Part Deux

Wild Taiwan - Herps, Inverts and Monkeys, oh my!

Taiwan's Prettiest Pitviper - The Second Coming!

Monster Taiwan Beauty Snake

Saturday Night Kraitapalooza

Taiwan Habitat, Part Two

Boiga kraepelini - Rare Coloration Pattern

Taiwan Herpers Association - 2009 Meeting & Show

FULL REPORT: Taiwan Herpers Association - 2009 Meeting & Show

Snakes of Borneo - need material for new website!

Record Hundred Pacer (graphic images!)

King of Taiwan's Aboriginal Culture - The Hundred-Pace Viper

Winter's here! All snakes are gone! (just kidding, see post)

Fighting Kraits

Fastest Snake in Asia - FINALLY BAGGED!

Snake Shows in Taiwan Grade Schools - a few photos

Taiwan Turtles

Taiwan Red Bamboo Ratsnake (O. p. kawakamii)

Juvenile Sinonatrix percarinata suriki

The Viper and the Walrus

Large Taiwan Beauty Snakes doing the Nasty

Sunday Night in the Taiwan Mountains - more pix

Taiwan (Herpeto)Fauna Potpourri

Huge Knife Crossing The Mountain

Three-Ring King Rat Circus

Viridovipera stejnegeri - a selection

Borneo Dispatches - The Inaugural Issue

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Family Outing

For the first time I've been able to see and observe wild monkeys in Yangmingshan National Park behind our house: Formosa macaques (Macaca cyclopis), the only monkey species on the island. The group consisted of one boss male, an adult female, a younger male and two kids. All of them were just as curious about me as I was about them, in particular the juvies, who kept trying to intimidate me with furious branch-shaking. They often came closer to get a better look at me, but never closer than six, seven meters. Of course, the light was completely useless - I was standing on the road in the blazing midday sun, and the monkeys were sitting under the murky light of the roadside canopy. Still, a very impressive encounter - at least half an hour went by before they took their show back on the road....

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Graveyard Cobra

This morning I searched a dilapidated and heavily overgrown cemetery for basking reptiles. The individual plots in Chinese graveyards are often quite large, covered with bricks or concrete and surrounded by low walls. I was sitting on one of those low walls eating a rice dumpling when I noticed a faint rustling behind the tombstone three feet away, and got to witness an almost seven foot long Chinese cobra (Naja naja atra) slinking off into the undergrowth without much apparent haste. I was too gobsmacked to take a picture (never saw his head anyway), and kept sitting there for at least another twenty minutes, savoring the privileged experience of having lunch at arm's length from one of the most awe-inspiring predators on this island.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Wild taro seed pod

(Colocasia esculenta)

Fencin'

I've been meaning to post this since I took it last July....Japalura polygonata xanthostoma is one of the more common lizards in Taiwan. He didn't mind me getting as close as two feet, not even when I set up the tripod and took a huge series of shots from various positions (there was also a baby mantis next to him on the fence)

Mossy Dragon

A stone dragon guarding a small pond that's part of a luxuriously designed, but now dilapidated private grave in the Sanchih hills.

Bamboo Viper, Update

The night of Friday the 13th (always my lucky day!) of February I went herping with a few friends, and on the way home I decided to show them the spot where I had discovered the wee tree viper in January - and would you believe our luck!?! Not only did we find it again, but it was actually perching on the very same twig as four weeks before!! Dig the infrared sensor pits between eyes and nostrils...

Buffalo at Work

This is one of the last working water buffaloes in Taipei County (and Taipei City, I would presume). The gentleman behind the harrow (if that's what it is) was quite aware and proud of this fact, too: "Bet you haven't seen one of these in a long time, eh?" he beamed.

Fern Frond

Late Thursday afternoon, in a neighboring forest.

Tree. Doves. Mountain.

Not necessarily in that order. Red-collared Doves (Streptopelia tranquebarica ), Guandu Nature Park, early February.