Field Shots near Brown's Woods State Park

Me and my son went to a place just outside of Brown's Woods Park. Actually it was a soccer field that had been recently flooded from all of our recent flooding. We had been told about a story that appeared in the paper where people were cleaning up flood debris out of this soccer field and it was littered with snakes. So we thought we should go and check this out.



We walked the outskirts of the field and only encountered a whole lot of frogs. Here's a couple of smaller American Toads we found along that walk.



From there we encountered this very fiesty Brown Snake when we flipped a trash can over.



Near the entrance of the soccer field we saw a couple of pieces of plywood in the grass. When we flipped them, we found this beautiful Fox Snake. He was around 24 inches long and had quite a fiesty spirit at first, but after a while, like most fox snakes, he calmed right down and was handled rather easily and freely.



Under the same plywood was several Eastern Garter Snakes. This one was real skittish and kept trying to hide his head under his body (something I haven't seen so much in garter snakes, but more so in racers).



All in all, we had a real good trip looking for snakes, it was just incredible hot outside. Now is a very good time of year to do "flipping" for snakes because of their tendency to lay low during the summer heat. Most snakes are more active at night during this time of year in Iowa because of the heat.