Tag Archives: reptiles

Episode 74: Origin Stories VI with Stacey and Kim

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy Four! I want to wish you all a happy and peaceful holiday season.

I have shoutouts to some new patrons of the show!  Ian Kanda, thanks so much for your one-time contribution.  Ian is strictly listening to the show in order so hopefully he’ll hear my shout-out before the fourth of July.  I have some new Patreoners as well!  Kim Brown, thank you so much and your timing is rather excellent!  And a special shout-out to Ruth and Henry, who love to go herping with their dad Andrew Davis.  That makes me happy (and thanks for the nice note Andrew, and for supporting the show). I appreciate y’all.

As always, I want to say thank you to all of the show’s patrons!  I’m grateful for everyone’s contributions and it does keep the show rolling along. And if you’re out there listening and you would like to kick in a few bucks, it’s easy to do, you simply go to the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three bucks a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee! You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

I also want to give Kris Haas a shoutout for both his kind words and some very thoughtful comments, thank you sir.  I do like hearing from folks – your thoughts, opinions, guest suggestions, whatever you got.  You can email me at somuchpingle@gmail.com.  Also please note that I am on Instagram, been there a long while now, but I’m also on Post dot News, and Mastodon now, under the SoMuchPingle handle. 

This week we’ve got our sixth installment of Origin Stories, and this episode features Stacey Schenkel and Kim Brown.  I owe Stacey a bit of an apology because it took me a while to get this one put together – I think we recorded her segment at the end of February.  And then I traveled a bunch and went back to work, and didn’t get a bookend interview recorded until this fall with Kim, and so this project got a little dusty.  But I like how this one turned out, I think Stacey and Kim pair well together.

Thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, tips for herping better, etc.

-Mike

Episode 72: Weird Tales from the Field

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy Two!  It’s the day before Halloween, an appropriate time to release these tales of strange occurrences from the world of field herping.

As always, I want to say thank you to all of the show’s patrons, including our newest Patreon member Brad Allen!  Thank you so much Brad, and I appreciated your note as well.  I’m grateful for everyone’s contributions and it does keep the show rolling along. And if you’re out there listening and you would like to kick in a few bucks, it’s easy to do, you simply go to the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three bucks a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee! You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

This week’s show came out of a suggestion from someone (I can’t recall who) last fall to do a show on the weird/creepy/spooky/unusual things that happen out in the field.  I began soliciting stories and recorded the first of them back in January, and the last was recorded a few weeks ago.  I want to say thanks to everyone who contributed to this episode – Matt Ratcliffe, Jake Scott and his alleged litter robot, John Burris, Tim Warfel, Matt Cage, Jeff Martineau, Rob Kreutzer, Pat Kain, and Bryan Hughes.  I also want to thank the folks who sent in stories that I couldn’t include for one reason or another.

Thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, lifting curses cast by Hungarian witches, tips for herping better, etc.

-Mike

Episode 71: Talking Tuatara with Sarah Lamar

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy One!  Here it is, mid-October and the fall rains are soaking us here at SMP world headquarters.

As always, I want to say thank you to all of the show’s patrons, including Brandon Bourassa, who came in at one Patreon level and recently went up to the next level – thank you Brandon, I appreciate that.  I also want to give a shout out to our newest patron, Christian Diederich, who made a one-time contribution via Venmo.  Thank you so much, Christian, and it was fun hearing about your recent experiences with rainbow snakes.  Christian spotted a neonate rainbow snake while driving 55 on a highway at night, which is pretty cool.  It got me thinking about my own rainbow snake sighting, which was 25 years ago and I haven’t seen one since.  It was suggested that maybe I should herp better.

I took a peek at some of the show’s stats this week, I don’t do this often, because it’s easy to obsess over numbers and guess what?  42 thousand listens to date.  I think that’s an amazing number and I appreciate everyone’s help in getting here.

Our show this week features a conversation with Sarah Lamar, a doctoral candidate at the Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington, New Zealand.  It’s amazing to me that I can talk with someone on the other side of the planet with relatively little effort at all.  Sarah’s research brings her into close contact with those amazing rhynchocephalians (see photo) and I thoroughly enjoyed our talk.

Thanks for coming on the show, Sarah!  It was so much fun.  And thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, methods for opening your third eye, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers! Mike

Episode 70: Panel Talk with Some Illinois Bois

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy!  It’s nearly October and I hope all of you remain safe and healthy out there. It’s good to be talking with you all again after a bit of a gap – I had a lot on my plate for the past few weeks.  You’re probably thinking that an old retired guy ought to have plenty of free time, and usually that is true enough.  But I recently started doing some half-time consulting work for my old department at the university, and I’ll be working there for just a few months or so.  A temporary thing, I have no desire to rekindle a career.  So thanks for your patience while I worked all of that out and got started.

As always, a big thank you to all of the show’s supporters – there are costs associated with running any entertainment channel and I am grateful to all of you for keeping this little boat afloat.  And if you’re out there listening and you would like to kick in a few bucks, it’s easy to do, you simply go to the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three bucks a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee! You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

Here we go with another panel discussion show!  I haven’t done one in a while, and I came up with the notion of getting a group together to talk about herping in my home state.  Jeremy Schumacher and Justin Michels return to the microphone for this, and I’m happy that Joey Cavataio agreed to join us, so we’ve got representation from the north, south, east, and west corners of the state.

Thanks Jeremy, Justin and Joey – it was fun chatting with the three of you.  And thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, dolomite prairies near you, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers! Mike

Episode 69: The Guest Host – Host Guest Episode

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Sixty Nine!  And for the first time, we have a guest host, Josh Holbrook, who graciously agreed to turn things around and ask me some questions.  Since I started the podcast, I have received many requests along the lines of “I wanna hear someone interview YOU!”.  I figured I would just keep putting this off but okay, here it is!  Like most people I’m not entirely comfortable talking about myself but Josh made things easy and we rolled along for almost two hours.  This interview was conducted in June of 2022 at the Santa Cruz field station near Iquitos, Peru.

As always, I want to take a minute to thank all of the show’s patrons – there are costs associated with running any entertainment channel and I am grateful to all of you for keeping this little boat afloat.  And if you’re out there listening and you would like to kick in a few bucks, it’s easy to do, you simply go to the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three bucks a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee! You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

Thanks again Josh, for the great interview!

And thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions,, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers! Mike

 

Episode 66: Herp Adventures in China with Kevin Messenger

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Photo by Kevin Messenger.

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Sixty Six!  It’s good to be back in the studio, and I hope all of you remain safe and healthy out there.  It’s mid-summer here at SMP world headquarters and I’m back after a week off to get some work done around the house.

As always, I want to thank all of the patrons of the show – we would not be kicking off a third season without you and I appreciate your support.  To others in the listening audience, if you like the show, please consider supporting it via the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three buck a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee!  You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

This week it’s my great pleasure to talk with Dr. Kevin Messenger.  Kevin is a professor at Nanjing Forestry University in China.  I’ve known Kevin for a number of years and we’ve spent some time in the field, and he and his dad came down to Peru on one of our tours a few years ago.  Anyone involved with field herping for a while is familiar with Kevin’s China posts on the old Field Herp Forum.  Of course, we talk about those posts, but Kevin has more awesome cards up his sleeve, including his discovery of multiple new herp species in China, and his book on the rat snakes of China.  I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did, and here are some important links to Kevin’s work (and play):

Kevin’s post on Field Herp Forum – “A New Species of Kurixalus Treefrog!”

A link to the paper in which Kevin and his colleagues describe the new Kurixalus treefrog

Another paper we discussed where Kevin and colleagues describe a new species of Megophrys

Kevin’s list of publications on ResearchGate

Let’s not forget about Kevin’s new book, “The Asian Ratsnakes and Kin of Greater China”.  You can find the softbound copy on Amazon.com, or go to Lulu.com if you prefer a hardbound edition.  I’m a big fan of this book and I hope you enjoy it as much as i do.

One more thing – you can search Kevin’s name on YouTube and find his channel, which includes the “Baby Monkeys Playing in China” video (currently with 55m views).

Thanks for coming on the show, Kevin!  It was good to talk with you again.  And thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, frog call recording, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers! Mike

Episode 65: Snakes are Long with Dr. Andrew Durso

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Sixty Five!  I hope all of you remain safe and healthy out there.  I’m back in the booth after a couple of weeks in Peru and it’s great to talk with you all again.

As always, I want to thank all of the patrons of the show – we would not be kicking off a third season without you and I appreciate your support.  To others in the listening audience, if you like the show, please consider supporting it via the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can support the show for as little as three buck a month – less than a fancy cup of coffee!  You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

I also want to mention that my buddy Bryan Hughes and I were recent guests on the Arizona Wildlife Federation podcast, which is hosted by my long-time friend, Michael Cravens.  And of course Bryan has been on my show a number of times and I did an episode with Michael back in season one.  At any rate, Michael had us on to discuss field herping, as a recreational activity and as a recreational activity in Arizona, and it is Episode 12.  It was a lot of fun and thanks Michael for inviting me to participate.  If you’re living out there and you’re partaking of the tremendous natural wonderland that is Arizona, well you should be listening to the Arizona Wildlife Federation podcast.  Michael does a great job with the show and it’s off to a great start.  Check it out!

My guest this week is Dr. Andrew Durso, he is an Assistant Professor of Wildlife Biology at Florida Gulf Coast University, and it’s been my privilege to know him for more than a decade and we’ve worked on a few projects together and I hope that continues.  Andrew describes himself as an ecologist but as you’ll hear from our conversation, he’s involved in other projects outside the focus of ecology, so I will just call him a scientist with a capital S.  Andrew is also the author of the fantastic Life is Short, but Snakes are Long blog, which we cover as well.  We also discuss one scientific paper in particular, “Harnessing the Power of a Global Network of Citizen Herpetologists by Improving Citizen Science Databases“, which can be downloaded from Dr. Durso’s list of publications.

Thanks so much for coming on the show Andrew!  It was great to chat with you and I look forward to our next meeting.

And thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, blind snake capture techniques, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers! Mike

Episode 64: A European Odyssey Examined

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Sixty Four!  I hope all of you remain safe and healthy out there as we roll into June. First up I want to give a shoutout to the Minnesota Herpetological Society for inviting me to speak at their first in-person meeting since pre-Covid.  I made a rocket run up to Minneapolis St. Paul on Friday and back on Saturday, and I talked about The Field Herping Guide, the Pingleton/Holbrook collaboration project, and also, this show and how it got started.  It’s a great herp society and they once again made me feel welcome, so thanks again to all the folks in the MHS.

As always, I want to thank all of the patrons of the show – we would not be kicking off a third season without you and I appreciate your support.   To others in the listening audience, if you like the show, please consider supporting it via the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

HERPETOLOGY SUMMER CAMP!  Coming up this summer! Through their Compass Summer Experience program, Montreat College is hosting their annual Herpetology Summer Camp for high school students, from June 19th thru the 24th, with an option for an additional week thru July 1st.  The camp is hosted by Professor Josh Holbrook, and students will experience amphibians and reptiles through a blend of classroom and field sessions.  For more information and to register, see the Herpetology Summer Experience page.

This week’s show is a discussion of a recent field herping trip to Greece, Hungary, and Slovenia.  I set up a microphone in our AirBNB suite at the end of the trip, in order to get everyone’s impressions of the trip.  Special thanks to John Burris, Matt Cage, Bryan Hughes, Pat Kain, Chris MacDonald, Jeff Martineau, Erik McCormick, Anniek Tump, Gerrit Verspui, and Tim Warfel.

And thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, herping tips for the Acropolis, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers! Mike

 

Episode 63: Herp Science Sunday with Drs. Alex Krohn and Drew Davis

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Sixty Three!  I hope all of you remain safe and healthy out there as we feature yet another Herp Science Sunday episode, which features aquatic turtles and drones – yay science!

As always, I want to thank all of the patrons of the show – we would not be kicking off a third season without you and I appreciate your support.   To others in the listening audience, if you like the show, please consider supporting it via the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

HERPETOLOGY SUMMER CAMP!  Coming up this summer! Through their Compass Summer Experience program, Montreat College is hosting their annual Herpetology Summer Camp for high school students, from June 19th thru the 24th, with an option for an additional week thru July 1st.  The camp is hosted by Professor Josh Holbrook, and students will experience amphibians and reptiles through a blend of classroom and field sessions.  For more information and to register, see the Herpetology Summer Experience page.

This Herp Science Sunday is a three-person conversation between me, Dr. Alex Krohn, and Dr. Drew Davis, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.  Drew describes the details of a drone survey project along the Rio Grande drainage in south Texas, which looked for presence and numbers of the Rio Grande Cooter (Pseudemys gorzugi).  The results are published in a PLOS ONE research article entitled:

A drone-based survey for large, basking freshwater turtle species

and the authors are Amy P. Bogolin, Drew R. Davis, Richard J. Kline, and Abdullah F. Rahman. You can download the paper as a PDF from the link above, or you can contact me and I will email you a copy.

I enjoyed our conversation and was amazed at all of the logistical and bureaucratic hurdles that needed to be cleared to do this survey.  Dr. Davis is also the chief editor for the SSAR publication Herpetological Review, which we also discuss for a bit.  I should also mention that Drew is also researching the distribution and ecology of the threatened Black-spotted Newt (Notophthalmus meridionalis) in south Texas.  Did I mention he’s very busy?

Thank you Drew for coming on the show, and thanks as always to Alex, who makes Herp Science Sunday possible. And thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, drone acrobatics exercises, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers! Mike

 

Episode 62: Origin Stories V with Tom, Greg, and Nick

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Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Sixty Two!  I hope all of you remain safe and healthy out there as we roll into Season Three!

First of all, I want to thank all of the patrons of the show – we would not be kicking off a third season without you and I appreciate your support.   To others in the listening audience, if you like the show, please consider supporting it via the So Much Pingle Patreon page. You can also support the show via one-time contributions via PayPal or Venmo (please contact me via email to somuchpingle@gmail.com).

It is great to be back in the studio again after what seemed like a long time away.  If you’re on social media, chances are you already know I spent 21 days in Greece, Hungary, and Slovenia.  And about two hours in Italy.  But mostly Greece, which was amazing and I and I can’t wait to return there.  It was a big herping trip and my group did quite well over there, finding more than fifty species, and some of them iconic European herps. I have been reading about these species for the past half century, so it was pretty special to see some of them, like marginated tortoises, and four-lined rat snakes and green lacertas, along with European pond turtles, vipers and Aesculapian snakes.

But it’s good to be back home and I thank you all for your patience while I was away. A few final bits of housekeeping – as I mentioned earlier, I’ve got an AMA slash origin stories show featuring yours truly coming up this summer (and it’s the summer of 2022).  AMA means Ask Me Anything, so if you’ve got some questions for me, QUESTIONS THAT CAN BE READ ON A CLEAN-RATED SHOW, send ‘em in to somuchpingle at gmail dot com.  I’ve got some responses already and thank you folks for those.

HERPETOLOGY SUMMER CAMP!  Coming up this summer! Through their Compass Summer Experience program, Montreat College is hosting their annual Herpetology Summer Camp for high school students, from June 19th thru the 24th, with an option for an additional week thru July 1st.  The camp is hosted by Professor Josh Holbrook, and students will experience amphibians and reptiles through a blend of classroom and field sessions.  For more information and to register, see the Herpetology Summer Experience page.

For this show, we’re reaching back to some recordings I made in Peru last January.  We have Origin Stories from Tom Williams, Greg Stephens, and Nick Burgmeier. Tom is from the UK and I hadn’t met him in person before Peru, he’s a world traveler and a real ball of fire and I enjoyed spending some time in the field with him.  Greg and Nick are old friends of mine, and so I interviewed them together, as they are buddies with a lot of shared experiences.  As I’ve said before it’s a lot of fun when my friends come to Peru for the first time and I get to be there when their minds are blown, and I especially enjoyed having these two come down to the hot and sweaty rain forest.

Thanks Tom, Greg and Nick for coming on the show and sharing your experiences! And thanks for listening everyone! And as always, please keep the comments and suggestions coming, and please take time to rate the show on your podcast platform! The show email is somuchpingle@gmail.com, and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, getting mambas out of trees, tips for herping better, etc.

Cheers! Mike