Thus I eventually met my first bromeliad and gradually, for various reasons, my reptile involvement was suppressed, but not my interest. By 1975 I no longer kept a large collection of creatures and in 1976 started Tropiflora. Over the intervening years, many, many trips have been mounted to far-flung jungles and deserts in search of botanical bounty. Along the way, many encounters with my reptile friends have made the trips even more interesting, joyful and fulfilling for this ex-herper. So to hopefully bring a smile or maybe even a shiver to you this spring, here are a few anecdotes about encounters of the slithery kind that we have had over the years while collecting plants. The Cargo Report has often mentioned reptile encounters: like the time I stepped on a very large alligator one night while snake hunting, to reptile collecting ad-ventures we had in Venezuela on our first trip there in 1975. However, these stories will be limited only to those that were accidental or surprise encounters we had while pursuing plants.

A large gator we encountered in the Everglades
Photo ©Ondrej Lukscheiter

My late, great friend Wally Berg was a true outdoorsman in his own right, and few things caused him any trepidation in the wilds…except snakes, spiders and other creepy things. When we inevitably crossed paths with a reptile, Wally was content to step to the other side of the trail and make a hasty exit. All too frequently for his liking, I would drop everything and pick up the creature and bring it over to a wide-eyed Wally to declare its beauty and explain its virtues. For his part, Wally was at best tolerant, hoping I’d just put it down so we could continue on our way. I’d read his reaction and only occasionally ask him to touch or hold a specimen so I could get a picture! I knew how far to push him and never asked him to hold anything dangerous or too creepy. Never did I ask him to hold a snake. As a result, Wally never refused, though definitely had the look of someone long-suffering as I cheerfully placed his hand in just the right position. Wally was definitely a good sport!  

On one collecting trip on the Amazon River we beached our small boat on a tangled shoreline to explore the swampy forest. Ankle deep water flooded the forest and fish of surprisingly large size could be seen making a hasty retreat among the buttress roots of the trees at our approach. We fanned out, five of us, to search for plant specimens. The canopy high above was dense and little undergrowth was found in the dimly litzone of the forest floor. The occasional butterfly distracted my attention as did the splashing schools of fleeing fish. Suddenly my eyes detected an unusual movement that I instinctively knew was that of a large snake. My reaction was swift and in a moment I had captured a fifteen foot long Anaconda in the shallow, tea-colored water.  No one  saw  me catch  the  snake  so  I carried the protesting reptile

towards the boat where the others were waiting. When Wally saw me, for a moment had the “God, please don’t ask me to hold that thing!” look in his eyes. I didn’t, but asked that everyone make room on the cramped boat for our new passenger. My camera was in a nearby Ticuna Indian village where we had left our supplies on this rainy morning. No problem! I had the entire front end of the boat to myself and perched on the prow with my writhing companion. Wally, Franz and the two man crew crowded into the last three feet or so of the fourteen foot boat. Reaching the village in about fifteen minutes, I got Wally to take a photograph of me holding the ponderous snake for posterity before releasing it to the

dark, deep waters of the Amazon, much to everyone’s relief.   Costa Rica has always been a Mecca for naturalists and it was venomous snakes that first lured me to that country when things were much more wild and pristine back in 1968. Since then we have traveled to the verdant country many a time. One occasion Wally, Dorothy, Linda and I were picked up by our friend Chester Skotak and driven to his house in Atenas. The road was rural, but paved, and as we rode along chatting in the dark, my eyes scanned the road ahead in the glow of the headlamps, an involuntary reflex that comes of years of nighttime road collecting. Suddenly I shouted STOP and Chester hit the brakes thinking he was in imminent danger of striking someone. I jumped from the car before it fully stopped and raced into the glow of the lights, retrieving a five-foot long, gray patterned rat snake.

I showed off the beautiful specimen in the glow of the headlights and came around to get back in. Chester and Linda had other ideas, not wishing to share the front seat with an unknown reptile. Compromise was met and I traveled the rest of the way home with my arm extended out the window, holding the struggling snake. Next morning, exploring  a nearby creek, we saw many large Basilisk lizards, known locally as ‘Jesus Christi’ lizards because of their ability to run across the surface of water! Not easy to catch, I nevertheless captured a large, prehistoric looking male with a crest and fin down its back and tail. Naturally, it was impossible to hold and photograph the creature and if I put it down it would it disappear in less than the blink of an eye, so I once again called on Wally. Anguish was written on his face, but he never protested as I placed the tense lizard just so in his trembling hands.

Moments later we watched it race away on its hind legs like a small dinosaur. Ever the good sport, however reluctant, Wally held a variety of creatures from Poison Dart frogs to grotesque toads found during jungle forays.   Perhaps the best creature encounter I had with  Wally happened in the high Andes of Ecuador. It was there that we found what appeared to be a snake crossing a muddy road in the foggy forest. A closer look found it to be instead a giant earthworm! I had heard of these creatures, but had never before seen one. Occasionally of bright hues, this one was just brown, but about three feet long! I photographed it on the clay road but knew that the picture lacked anything to show the scale of the giant critter. So… Poor ol’ Wally. I asked him to pick it up to show its dramatic size. Wally balked. “Does it bite?” “Doesn’t have a real mouth or any teeth” I said. “Yuck” was his reply at the prospect of handling the slimy thing. Finally we compromised and Wally picked it up using his handkerchief. It became one of my favorite photos of my great adventures with Wally.

Linda and I traveled a few times through Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand (where there are no snakes!) and had lots of fun and a few memorable creature encounters, some of which we have written about before. For example; Linda’s tarantula encounter in the Australian outback, covered a few years ago in the Cargo Report, was really pretty scary.

My humorous but smelly baptism by a monitor lizard in the Philippines got quite a few chuckles from Cargo Report readers a few years back. Some of our favorite creature encounters were in Australia, a place noted for its abundant reptilian life. Here we canoed past salt water crocodiles nearly as big as our boat and swam with Johnston’s crocodiles, which are supposed to be fairly harmless. I ‘fished’ for file snakes with my feet among Pandanus roots in a pristine billabong. On a camping trip to Litchfield Park, we saw our first wild ‘Frilled Lizards’ and just had to catch one.

Actually the big males depend on their huge, flaring neck display for defense and they are actually quite slow and lumbering when they run. We ran down a few and took some great pictures. In Singapore, a trip to a reserve to observe Vanda orchids turned into a search for flying snakes. Yes, they exist, and I did get to photograph one!

Still, nothing else can compare to the reptilian adventures we have had in the American tropics. In pre-plant hunting days I made many reptile trips to Mexico and on one such trip was bitten on the thumb by a rattlesnake, but received no venom! Outside the Indian village of Tamala in Colima, I spent several hours walking the mountain forest with a four foot long Mexican Beaded Lizard, the Mexican equivalent of the Gila Monster, clamped onto my trouser leg.

Many other close calls, by proximity, have occurred in Costa Rica, Venezuela and Ecuador, where we found ourselves in ‘striking distance’ of some very annoyed venomous snakes. No deadly mishaps though. One of the spookiest was the time in Panama where we were in the mountain forest collecting and came back to the road, dumped our specimens and found a deadly pit viper amongst the collected plants.

 It was hiding in a bromeliad and did not emerge until it was in the sack. On the same trip, a particularly snaky trip as I recall, Wally came unglued when I was handling a large coral snake to try and photograph it. He took my picture, he said, so he’d have evidence as to what became of me.

No confidence!  As I have said many times in the past, collecting is just about as much fun as someone can have, and if you take the surprise encounters with snakes and spiders in stride, they only enrich what is already a smorgasbord for the senses. Speaking for myself, I never consider a trip a complete success unless I get that tingle you only get when you realize you are standing uncomfortably close to something completely wild and free and possibly deadly. To each his own!