Another retrospective look, this time back at my second herping trip to one of my favourite areas of Europe, south-west Spain. Looking recently at some old photo galleries on my somehow still just-about breathing laptop, I realised there were still a few (poor as ever) photos of some of the Almeria desert scenery, and a couple of snakes, that I may as well wap on here, as, well, why not..
I’ll make this briefer than my usual rambling attempts at story-telling, mostly as these days I have trouble remembering what I did last week, let alone in October 2014, which is where the magical story begins…and starwipe…
Being airport-adjacent, as well as full of snakes and other wildlife, makes Guadalhorce an excellent starting point to any Andalucian trip. Unless you fly into somewhere other than Malaga, which is not going to happen if your closest “International” airport is Newcastle. Actually that's unfair, I flew from Bristol, being a southerner back then. Still, maybe if they moved Marbella closer to another city in southern Spain the flight schedule would be mixed-up a bit. This was another relatively brief trip, just a handful of nights to see if I could come up with any additional species to those managed by me and Peal in 2013, with the added benefit of a bit of local knowledge from that trip. But with the (also added..) disadvantage of not having Neil there to do any last-minute trip-saving snake catches.
Luckily, I managed to get one of my target species on the very first afternoon, a beautiful juvenile Ladder snake (Rhinechis scalaris), so my trip was already saved, and made! Yes, a common species, but with not having been able to spend a lot of time herping in their range, bar last autumn’s trip and a baking hot family summer holiday on Menorca in 1990-something, this certainly was not a common sight for me. The young ones are of course where the species gets its name, the cross-banded ladder pattern turning into stripes with age. My shots against a nicer looking background were dreadful, so I hope you like looking at my hand, as that’s about as in-situ as I could muster (err that pattern continues later in trip as you’ll see).
The area may be great for snakes, but it’s a difficult area to actually catch anything, as the vast boulder embankments offer brilliant escaping opportunities for the area’s lightning fast whipsnakes and Malpolons, and indeed anything else with no shoulders. My ladder was flipped, and despite being a bit too mobile for any good photos, was an easy snag. The next day I started early in a different area of the reserve, and as the heat of the day started to build, my chances of surprising a basking snake started to diminish. Until I came across the biggest Montpellier snake (Malpolon monspessulanus) I’ve ever seen, looking like a giant coil of cobra on the dead leaves and dappled sunlight of another massive boulder pile. I’m not sure it’s possible to surprise one of these snakes unless you flip them, they seem permanently on high alert, and this one wasn’t going to be hanging around much longer either. Before I could take a step it somehow swirled out of its gigantic coil and vanished down into the rocks in a blink of an eye, making me wonder if I’d just imagined the encounter. That sort of supernaturally fast movement from an almost unnaturally still starting point, something that many species are capable of is, for me, one of those magical things about snakes.
Still in shock and dragging my feet from missing my chance to snag a monster Malpolon, I flipped an old umbrella to find a small light brown coil of smooth snake. But frustratingly it immediately vanished down into a gap in the rocks below, and to this day I’m not sure if it was a Southern smooth snake (Coronella girondica), or a False smooth snake (Macroprotodon cucullatus). Neither species are known for their supernaturally fast movement either... Both would’ve been lifers, but in that brief struggle with the umbrella, I couldn’t be sure I’d seen an ID feature to tell which one. I got to watch, but not catch, one more little Malpolon keeping its eyes on me from the safety of a boulder embankment to round up the snake sightings for the day.
I had a look around some higher elevations in the mountains around Malaga the next morning before heading off east towards the desert badlands of Almeria. I managed to flip a small adult Ladder snake under an old tool box in some woodland at the edge of an old quarry. After a bunch of failed photo attempts I decided to pop it back under the box, with the hope of flipping it again and snapping the coil…10 seconds later I flipped my new favourite tool box and it had vanished into the pine-needles, never to be seen again….
Almeria and the Tabernas badlands
Next up were a couple of nights out east, in the wild west of Europe. Almeria holds Europe’s only desert area, and as the canyons and valleys of America’s desert counties were up there with tropical rainforests in my dream herping locations as a kid, it didn’t take much to fall for the Tabernas badlands when Neil introduced me to the area the previous year. Sorbas again was the base for a couple of nights in the Canyonlands.
I was hoping to catch a big Malpolon, again that would prove problematic, but I managed to get my hands on a couple of other species at least. First up came a lovely Viperine snake (Natrix maura), a water-lover in one of the driest areas on the continent, found in a lovely gorge area where we’d found this species (and Malpolon sheds) on the last trip. Next up I tried further out east, away from the areas where we’d looked last time, and I came upon a ruined farm building on some cool looking hillside habitat. This spot provided another Malpolon sighting, again too fast to snag, but this one lead me to another snake, a young Horseshoe whipsnake (Hemorrhois hippocrepis).
I’m not sure if I interrupted a predation attempt on the whipsnake by the bigger Malpie, as the whipsnake seemed a bit sluggish for such a hot morning and was almost in exactly the same spot in the rock-pile under where the Malpie had shot off from. Possibly had a slight head injury too, although it seemed mobile enough when released back into its dry rocky homestead.
After admiring the healthy local Black redstart population, and a bit more hide-and-seek with probably the same Malpie later that day, I explored some other areas, but only managed a small escaping Horseshoe whipsnake close to the road near Sorbas to round up my wild-west snaking.
Sevilla, Donana, then bed
That pretty much finished up the planned bit of the trip, and with that the part of the trip where I would actually find anything, but my last couple of days were spent back in the west of Andalucia to have a quick look in the Sevilla and Donana areas. A few flipping spots around the south of Sevilla (before I called into the city to catch my 1st Betis game in almost 10 years that evening) didn’t provide, neither did The Wall; site of mine and Peal’s 1st ever European snake back in 2002 (a poorly IDd and even more poorly snaffled Horseshoe whipper), other than its customary urban wall lizards (Podarcis vaucheri) and Moorish geckos.
I’d never been to Donana before, and I hadn’t left myself with enough time to do much searching with all the driving (I didn’t stay here overnight), so some nice duneland habitat provided not much more than escaping lizards and a flipped scorpion. One for another trip this area, much like the time I drove to the wrong window first in a Floridian McDonalds, this barely counting as anything other than a poorly executed drive-thru.
So, that’s what happens when you don’t take any decent photos, don’t write up anything interesting that happened during the trip at the time you can remember it, and yet still decide to post something about it six years later. You’re welcome.