How to Keep a Herping Field Journal

A herping journal is different from a bird list because reptiles and amphibians are governed by conditions. A garter snake is where it is because of the air temperature, the sun on that rock and the time since the last rain. A journal that records those conditions alongside the animal becomes predictive: after a season you know which nights the salamanders cross the road and which hour the wall lizards come out in April.

The record does not require touching the animal. A photograph from two metres, a few numbers and a sentence of behaviour is a complete entry. Pinning, flipping and crowding add nothing to the journal and a great deal of stress to the animal, and with venomous species they add risk you cannot undo.

Most of these take ten seconds at the time and cannot be recovered afterwards. The first six are the ones herpetological surveys actually use.

Reptiles and amphibians are ectotherms: their body temperature, and therefore their activity, tracks the environment. In temperate regions most snakes are active in a band of roughly 15 to 30 °C air temperature, basking at the cool end and sheltering at the hot end, which is why spring finds happen in the late morning on south-facing slopes and summer finds happen at dusk. Amphibians move on wet, mild nights; a mass migration of common toads to a breeding pond typically starts on the first evenings above about 5 °C with rain, and your journal is how you learn the date for your own pond.

Write the temperature you measured or the forecast you read, and say which. Over a few seasons the journal shows you the conditions each species appears in, and it starts telling you where to be tonight.

Red-sided Garter Snake

If you cannot identify to species, keep the group. Honesty travels better than a confident wrong name, and herps make this harder than birds: many are identified by scale counts, by the shape of a single head scale, or by a call you did not hear. A fire salamander with yellow blotches is unmistakable; a small brown newt in a torch beam often is not. Write the group, write the feature you could see, and let a later photo or a more experienced friend upgrade the entry.

Record the reason either way. “Vertical pupil, zigzag, reddish-brown: adder” is a record that can be checked. A name on its own is a guess with a tick next to it.

Fire SalamanderSmooth NewtAlpine Newt

Do not drop today's GPS on last year's road-cruising photo. The location in a journal is a historical claim about where the animal was at the time, and it should carry a precision: “this bank, within 20 m” or “this reserve, somewhere on the eastern trail”. Unknown is an acceptable answer in your notes. In AnimalDex, a historical location is what you confirm when reviewing an archive item, and a candidate without one stays out of the import queue rather than being pinned to a guess.

Keep two versions of sensitive sites. The precise one lives in your own journal. The public one, the version that appears on a profile or a community platform, is the coarse place. Adder hibernacula, rare turtle ponds and any site for a species with pet-trade value have been emptied by people who read a precise location online.

Herping field journal

Field behaviour is part of the method, and a few habits keep both the animal and the record intact.

• Do not handle

  Handling stresses the animal, transfers skin oils and sunscreen to amphibians that breathe through their skin, and with any snake you have not identified is a bite risk. Photograph from a distance and let it go about its business.

• Replace cover exactly

  If you lift a log, board or stone, put it back as it was and let the animal move back under on its own. Never set the cover down on top of the animal.

• No flash on nocturnal frogs

  Use a dim torch or red light for amphibians at night and keep the beam off them between frames. A frog's night vision is the thing it hunts and avoids predators with.

• Clean boots between sites

  Chytrid fungi (Bd and Bsal) and ranavirus travel on mud. Scrub and dry boots and nets between wetlands; it is the single biggest thing a herper can do for amphibians.

• Do not bait or move animals for a photo

  No posing, no placing a snake on a nicer rock, no chilling an animal to slow it down. The journal records what you found, where you found it.

A photograph from two metres, a few numbers and a sentence of behaviour is a complete entry.