So Much Pingle

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 [email protected]). 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 [email protected], 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

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy Three! Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the US and I wish everyone a good holiday. It's good to be back in the studio again after a few weeks off. 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 [email protected]). Our guest this week is Zach Truelock, an Indiana native who is currently doing some very important conservation work in Florida. Zach has been involved with a number of very cool herp conservation projects over the past few years, and also a co-creator for the Life Underfoot YouTube channel. I want to highlight a few links for Life Underfoot, some of which we talk about in the episode: Can We Save North America’s Rarest Salamander? Spotted Salamanders In A Vernal Pool Timber Rattlesnake Male Combat Jefferson's Salamanders 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 [email protected], and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, tips for herping better, etc. -Mike

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seventy Seven! And I hope you all remain safe and healthy out there, and I want to wish all of you a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year. It’s the first week of February and it’s good to be back home and to be turning out another episode, after being away for nearly a month in Peru. It was an interesting trip, to say the least, with a lot of travel issues going both down and back. I’ll spare you the details, but I am beginning to suspect that the golden age of air travel is behind us. All travel issues aside it was a great trip to Peru, and across 25 days and two back-to-back tour groups we managed to find a total of six bushmasters. Pretty incredible and I'm still processing all of that. Needless to say, I recorded segments with some of the folks who encountered their first bushmaster, and I will put that out sometime in the next few months. So Much Pingle Patrons! I want to give a shout-out to Craig Howard, the show’s newest patron. Craig was on our first Peru tour last month and he took some awesome photos, I especially liked some of his frog shots. It was good to meet you Craig, and thanks so much for your support. 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 [email protected]). Well, here we are again with another edition of Herp Science Sunday with Dr. Alex Krohn. That’s right, two in a row, even if they are a month apart, and, this one again features a guest from Australia. As I said before, this is more by accident than design, but Alex and I are happy about it and we hope you are as well. Our guest this week is Jules Farquhar, a doctoral candidate in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. Jules is a co-author on a paper published in the Journal of Biogeography last year entitled “Using Crowd-sourced Photographic Records to Explore Geographical Variation in Colour Polymorphism” Alex and I talked with Jules just before Christmas, about this paper, which concerns Lace Monitors, and we cover some other cool Australian herp stuff as well. 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 [email protected], and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, baby monitors to watch baby monitors, tips for herping better, etc. -Mike

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Sixty Seven! It's the end of July and I hope all of you remain safe and healthy out there. 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 [email protected]). Many of you have heard my interview with Nick Burgmeier about his work with hellbenders in Indiana. That was Episode 8, way back in season 1, and I didn’t just pull Nick’s name out of a hat for that interview. I had the privilege of helping out with hellbender surveys as far back as 2007, with my buddies Don Becker and Greg Stephens, and little did I know that all of that preliminary work would lead to the current hellbender raise-and-release project going on in Indiana. And to provide just a bit more detail, these are young adult hellbenders that are being released, they are raised from eggs collected in the wild in Kentucky and Ohio. This is necessary because Indiana hellbenders are in trouble – the state has a small population of adult hellbenders and if there are any eggs being produced, they haven’t been located. Thankfully these days there’s a lot of cooperation between various agencies in states with hellbenders, so there’s a lot of dedicated work to keep these awesome creatures in as many rivers as possible. This show was recorded in the field and since I knew we would be spending time in the water, I didn’t use my standard field rig. I captured everything on my Zoom HN4 recorder, which is my backup recorder these days. I used the unit’s built-in omni-directional microphone and so I captured everything – water noises, buckets, lots of banter and yakking, and sometimes multiple conversations happening in parallel. But I was able to record the event as it happened, and there’s a lot of running commentary from Nick and others that help to set the scene, and all of the banter – well, that’s just a lot of happy people taking part in a joyous event. Acknowledgements: First of all, special thanks to my friend Nick Burgmeier – Project coordinator and all-around good guy, and Marci Skelton, Nature Nick’s spouse and his number one fan. Shelby Roberts – AKA Bender Baby Mama, thanks for all of your work and for talking with me. Summer Brown, Madison Phillips and Zach Truelock were on hand to make sure everything went smoothly, and let’s not forget Thomas Coggeshall, holding down the fort back at the lab. I want to also thank Jarrett Manek for transporting us around and for the great behind the scenes tour at O’Bannon Woods. Other witnesses for this event include Don Becker, Greg Stephens, Justin Michels, Jeff and May Faircloth, John Burris and Jeremiah Jonothan. It was great to be there with you all. 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 [email protected], and there’s also a So Much Pingle group on Facebook, for discussion, comments, feedback, suggestions, herp confessions, pet names for Hellbenders, tips for herping better, etc. Cheers! Mike

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 [email protected]). 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 [email protected], 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