Field Herp Forum

Hi all,

thank you very much for taking the time to post all your wonderful tips! I'll spend a few days now researching all this and will come back with a tentative agenda for you to check

Thanks again!!

Hans

Hi all, we're planning to do our annual wildlife watching trip next year between January and June, and we picked Costa Rica. We have ten days in-country, we want to go see everything from bugs to reptiles (avian included) and from lowland to cloud forests, and we have no bloody idea where to start (...

Hi guys, thank you very much!! As for my experiences in Nepal, check my Facebook wall for starters. There's a bird album, a general album, a Dulit album, and others. After our wildlife trip to Chitwan NP, I spent an extra three weeks alone in Kathmandu, waiting for a new passport. And I got adopted ...

Hi all,

would anyone be able to identify this ca. 15-20 cm long lizard we found basking on a wall close to the Gurkha Museum in Pokhara, Nepal?
Hans Thanks very much in advance!

Cheers,

Hans

Thank you very much for your patronage!! Northern Taiwan, where I am now, is a tad cold now, only bamboo vipers (Viridovipera steijnegeri) are still out and about. But I saw my first Grey-capped (Pygmy) Woodpecker yesterday in the Central Mountains, so not all is lost

Thanks again!

Cheers

Hans

I re-read your book all the time, Hans. Cannot wait for the new one. Thank you too, Zach! I'm making good progress, actually. We're back in Northern Taiwan for two months, since Malaysia observes school holidays now, and the place where I live, as magically beautiful as it is , in winter it's the w...

Fieldherper wrote:Great Book and highly recommended. ! I too am awaiting the second book.

FH

Thank you!

I said it before, and imma say it again: The holiday season is upon us. What better gift for your herping friends (or yourself) than this wonderful book? A Cobra Hijacked My Camera Bag! Snakes and Stories from Taiwan Thanks for your continuous support :-) Cheers from Taiwan Hans PS: For those who've...

Martti Niskanen wrote:The immigration-process at the land-border is interesting to say the least.

Tell us!

What a haul! Love the ferret-badger ... great shots! How did he allow you to get this close, and why did he hold still this long?

Ribbit wrote:You didn't. I did. (Shhh, don't tell Hans.)

I HEARD THAT!

Lots of Singaporean herpers visit Borneo, where I live, and bring their own snake hooks. I don't think there should be an issue. Parangs, however, they will confiscate, even from check-in luggage.

Wonderful stuff! That Aphaniotis ornata is amazing ... reminds me of the leaf-nose lizards in Sri Lanka. Didn't know these existed in Borneo!

Thanks for sharing!

Hi all, I just came back from a ten-day field trip to West Papua, the Indonesian side of New Guinea. It was technically a birding trip, as we (my uncle and I) stayed in a birding lodge and did the whole up-at-oh-four-hundred-and-straight-into-the-mud-without-tea thing every day. But this was also ou...

Very nice post! Envy you the Xenodermus ! As far as I know, Camponotus gigas was recently given the new and IMHO much cooler name Dinomyrmex gigas . Yes, that's "Terror Ant" :-) That horned frog...are you sure it was nasuta ? There are so many different hornies these days... Excellent tarsier shots,...

Ha! No way!!!

Cool! Glad everything worked out! Yeah, Zeiss, Leica, Swarovski are expensive, but you know what they say: cry once, enjoy forever. Looking forward to your mail!

If you're looking for a really nice and almost cheap birding camera you won't have to hock the farm for, look into the Nikon Coolpix P900. Just bought one for my upcoming Papua trip, and it's badass. 83x magnification (equivalent to a four thousand mm lens, half of that from optics), and a really as...

WSTREPS wrote:This ties in with the somewhat recent thread about mimicry that unfortunately became overly convoluted thanks in part to the MonarchzMan and his serious case of Dunning–Kruger effect.

What thread is that?

Russell's Viper....you win

"I've got nothing against foreigners, some of my best friends are foreigners, but these particular foreigners aren't from here!"
- Geriatrix

Never seen anything like it - excellent job!

Thanks very much for the tips and the encouragement, Curtis and intermedius! I had actually also ordered Beehler's book...you can't have too many field guides! As for O'Shea's material, I had a look at the website, and while it is very interesting indeed, I still have to find a way to operate it so ...

Did you see any other herps from boats, like Trimeresurus purpureomaculatus?

T. purp doesn't exist in Borneo.

I viewed this and all recent Malaysia posts and enjoyed them more than most books & movies. Well, if I may shamelessly barge in with a plug here: you're in luck, Ameron. I'm turning our experiences from the past six years in Borneo into a book. Look forward to the balls-out hilarious, yet intriguin...

Hans, I'll make a deal with you. Despite my mild enthusiasm for body-infesting invertebrates that make for good stories, on my next trip I promise to find you some lizards you haven't seen/noticed/differentiated if you promise to monopolize the tunnelworm traffic. Deal? If that means I get to keep ...

I remember mainly that I noticed that some kind of animal was making tunnels beneath my skin. That was a bit unnerving. In Kuching hospital, it turned out to be a worm which had entered my leg though a hole made by a leech. I love Borneo. Now y'all are just being really unfair. Apart from crocodile...

It must have been horrible to cut short your half-around-the-world trip onaccounta measly slip on a wet stone. I can't begin to imagine your frustration sitting in that Kuching hotel with a cast on your wrist, with all those awesome herps beckoning just fifteen miles away. But here comes the bright ...

Before I comment on the rest: Bako is on a roadless portion of its peninsula, so all access is by boat. The tides control when and where you can access or leave the park. For both of my visits, I got a ride to the Bako Jetty, then waited for the tides to rise and a boat to be available. The first ti...

Ribbit wrote:You are already booked up until 2020?

Well, mostly with work, college preparation for the kids, and a wee ten days snuck in between for birding in Papua, and another for Chitwan National Park in Nepal. Starting in 2020, I'll be back in Taiwan and can relax

Wonderful post! The "no hunting" sign was the cherry on the ice cream!

I've been to Santubong countless times, but I had no idea they had Aphaniotis and Phoxophrys ! In fact, I've never seen those anywhere in Sarawak! Probably my selective ignorance at work again (at certain dark and lonely moments in the wee hours of the night, I still tend to view lizards as mere sna...

Amazing! I've never herped in West Malaysia, onaccounta my motto "hey, I live in bloody BORNEO, why would I need to go anywhere else?", but this series of posts has really knocked me off my arrogant pedestal. If Kurt and Monty are still active in 2020, I'll get down there for a tour. Trapdoor spider...

It cost me about 30 bucks in gas and cheese burgers per snake.

Thanks for almost making me spray my durian pudding across the room. Never seen our hobby in these terms

I saw no more flying lizards in Malaysia. That's one reason among many to go back soon. Not to sound meh, blah, or otherwise jaded, but there's a veritable Draco infestation on the trunks of the palm trees that surround the parking lot of that little forest park near my house. One practically trips...

Brilliant write-up! Thanks for sharing all these!

"Why Burmese pythons may be the best way to study diabetes, heart disease and the protective effects of gastric-bypass surgery in humans." https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/magazine/when-the-lab-rat-is-a-snake.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ma_20170519&nl=magazine&nl_art=6&nlid=76804897&ref=headline&te=1

Hi guys, thank you very much for all the tips! This here pretty much sums up the dilemma across the board: New Guinea is so diverse and poorly explored, it will be difficult to get anything useful. World's second-highest biodiversity, but so hard to explore - it's not only the formidable terrain, bu...

Hi all, is anyone aware of a field guide to the herps of New Guinea? Seeing as the only mammal guide costs 300 dollars, I don't have my hopes up for anything affordable (or even existing!), but maybe someone knows of some obscure paper or something that will help us ID stuff? We're going to Papua (I...

Thank you very much, everyone, for your learned comments! This is why we keep coming here!

Thanks!

Peter Engelen wrote:

Hans Breuer (twoton) wrote:Nice! Where did you find the N. pictus? I've only seen it on Mt Kinabalu once.

In Kubah National Park. Just behind the houses.

Nice! Where did you find the N. pictus? I've only seen it on Mt Kinabalu once.

Thanks very much, guys!!

Hi all, My friend Ch'ien Lee sent me these two photos with the caption: "Got a snake for you to run by your herp forums. Even though it looks like a standard wolf snake, this Lycodon doesn't seem to match anything in the books. It has both preocular and loreal scales so it can't be either L. effraen...

What, no one??

Thanks a lot!

Um ... Taiwan now has three Boigas? That's news to me. Those crazy taxonomists, eh? Next thing you know they'll be splitting Taiwan's Pareas into three species. Oh, wait a minute, they already did that. Sorry, I had a senior moment there. No idea what I was thinking there! Of course it's three Pare...