Resources: Anticrepuscular rays: Atmospheric optics

• Anticrepuscular rays – Wikipedia
• 
  Crepuscular rays – Wikipedia
• 
  Anti-crepuscular rays – Atmospheric optics
• 10 Most Incredible Images of Anticrepuscular Rays – Environmental Graffiti
• Yeah, But How? A brief foray into atmospheric optics – Grand Canyon River Guides

Friday, May 18, 2012

Yes, it is a generally poor photograph from a technical standpoint (as well as other standpoints); however, considering the shot was taken…

• at around 2:30am
• with no tripod; hands only
• with the shutter open for over two seconds

…I’ll take it!

I love storms, I enjoy thunder immensely, and I’m awestruck by lightning. It was a good time!

Although ringneck snakes are also known as ring-necked snakes, this Nashville hiking blog generally uses the term ringneck for the sake of consistency and simplicity.

The average adult size is six to ten inches, so this specimen briefly captured at Percy Warner park in Nashville was actually large for the species.

The Southern ringneck snake (Diadophis punctatus punctatus) is a Colubrid snake species, which basically means the ringneck is classified in the same family as water snakes and garter snakes – some of the most populous, successful snakes in the United States.

Although there is only one official species of Ringneck Snake, there are many subspecies — anywhere from twelve to fourteen subspecies, depending on the source. The Southern ringneck is the most common ringneck snake seen on the hiking trails in and around Nashville, Tennessee (e.g., Radnor Lake, the Warner parks, etc.).

The dorsal coloration of the southern ringneck is a solid olive, dark or bluish gray to black, some say brownish, and broken only by a distinct yellow neck band.

If you’re hiking in or near Nashville and you see a tiny dark snake making its escape across the trail, it is almost certainly a ringneck snake. The Southern ringneck is so small, you are not likely to notice the yellow ring around the snake’s neck unless you’re looking closely.

This nature blogger has seen more than one dead Southern ringneck snake on or beside various hiking trails in Tennessee, probably the victims of being stepped on by hikers who did not even notice the snake.

The Southern ringneck snake is found throughout the southeastern United States from Alabama & Florida up the Eastern U.S. to southern New Jersey.

Ringneck snakes are secretive, nocturnal snakes that are rarely seen during the daylight hours. Most people are unaware that ringneck snakes are actually slightly venomous; however, their non-aggressive nature and tiny, rear-facing fangs pose little to no threat to humans, even when handled.

Ringneck snakes in general are best known for their unique defense posture of curling up their tails exposing their bright ventral surface (the underside or belly) when the small snake is threatened in the wild. The Southern ringneck snake has a bright yellow belly with dotted lines running the length of the snake.

Ringneck snakes are believed to be fairly abundant throughout their ranges in general; however, scientific research is generally lacking for the small snake species. More in-depth investigations are greatly needed. It is the only species within the genus Diadophis, and currently fourteen subspecies are identified, but many herpetologists question the morphologically-based classifications…

Biological info

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Reptilia
Order: Squamata
Suborder: Serpentes
Family: Colubridae
Subfamily: Xenodontinae
Genus: Diadophis

Ringneck snake subspecies

San Bernardino ringneck snake: D. p. modestus (Bocourt, 1866)
Northwestern ringneck snake: D. p. occidentalis (Blanchard, 1923)
Coralbelly ringneck snake: D. p. pulchellus (Baird & Girard, 1853)
Southern ringneck snake: D. p. punctatus (Linnaeus, 1766)
Regal ringneck snake: D. p. regalis Baird & Girard, 1853
San Diego ringneck snake: D. p. similis (Blanchard, 1923)
Mississippi ringneck snake: D. p. stictogenys (Cope, 1860)
Monterey ringneck snake: D. p. vandenburghii (Blanchard, 1923)

Resources: Southern ringneck snake
Southern Ringneck Snake – Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH)

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/herpetology/fl-guide/Diadophisppunctatus.htm

Diadophis punctatus – Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diadophis_punctatus

Ringneck Snake (Diadophis punctatus) – Savannah River Ecology Laboratory

http://srelherp.uga.edu/snakes/diapun.htm

southern ring-necked snake (Diadophis punctatus punctatus) – VA Wildlife

http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/wildlife/information/?s=030021

Photos of southern ringneck snake – PicSearch

http://www.picsearch.com/pictures/Animals/Snakes/Snakes%20M-Z/Southern%20ringneck%20snake.html

Southern Ringneck Snake – Herp Center Network forum

http://www.herpcenter.com/field-herping/3634-southern-ringneck-snake.html

Sunday, April 29, 2012

[Show as slideshow]

I took these Nashville sunset photographs as I walked across the Green Hills Mall parking lot on my home from a bit of Krogering. It had finished raining about an hour earlier, and the skies were spectacular. This was one of those types of sunsets that makes it look as though the horizon were on fire.

Due to the decreasing light, the shutter remained open longer and longer, making clear shots extremely difficult. I deleted far more images than I saved; however, I’m glad I at least captured these.

NextGen Gallery: A free WordPress plugin

This is my very first experiment using the free NextGen Gallery WordPress plugin; it took over an hour to figure this much out. It’s definitely not the easiest plugin to figure out. However, I’ve finally learned how to:

1. Create, save, edit photo galleries
2. Edit the ALT tag, description, and the associated tags (keywords) for each image
3. Float a slideshow to the left or the right so text will flow around it (the same effect used for images on all of my blogs)

I have not figured out how to automatically cause the slideshow to start when it’s not designated in the URL (e.g., http://hikingnature.com/ vs. http://hikingnature.com/sunset/april-sunset-nashville-frasier-photos/nggallery/slideshow/).

John Somers, traveling in Africa with wife Carina:

When I turned a corner there was a [small truck] in the road in front of us. The driver started reversing and stopped next to us. I’m Irish, and he was speaking Afrikaans, but I could make out the word ‘elephant’, . I tried to reverse, but the back of the car was half off the road in a ditch and in order to get out I would have had to drive forward.

Amarula, the road rage elephant (photo 1/7)

The elephant came walking down the road. I was afraid of making a noise and turned the engine off.

Amarula was at John’s vehicle by this time; the disturbed elephant broke the driver’s side window and rubbed up against the car.

It really seemed to regard the car as a female elephant and was making advances to ‘her’. Carina and I were very nervous, because we could see the elephant was in musth.

Musth is when bull elephants experience a rise in reproductive hormone and highly aggressive behavior.

When the bull started flipping the car over, my life literally started flashing past before my eyes. The car landed on its roof and we were lying inside it.

Resources: Amarula, the road rage elephant

• Snopes.com – Road rage elephant a true story
• Musth – Wikipedia
• Don’t you mess with Amarula the elephant – Taildom

Post written on Tuesday, April 10, 2012

[ As in other posts within our family of blogs, you can see different images of the subject by clicking your browser's REFRESH button... Enjoy! ]

Beautiful women aside, today was a simply perfect day in the life of this avid but hefty hiker: Two separate hikes were squeezed in on this wonderful Saturday.

Lifetime friends and Radnor Lake aficionados, the Arnetts, invited me to tag along on their multi-generational family hike this morning. Michael and his sweet wife Amy picked me up at 9:30am, exactly as scheduled. We’ve not seen each other very often since I moved back to Nashville from Atlanta, where Mike & Amy still live (the Hotlanta ‘burbs, actually, north of the city), so it was a notable and eagerly anticipated reunion.

Ten minutes later we pulled into the west parking lot of Radnor Lake to meet Mike’s folks — Dr. Jim Arnett and his wife Linda.

It should be noted that very few people are more intimately familiar with Radnor Lake — especially Radnor Lake’s cold-blooded residents, the reptiles and amphibians — than Dr. Jim Arnett, longtime biology professor extraordinaire at Nashville’s Lipscomb University. Among other research, Dr. Arnett led a five-year turtle study at Radnor Lake…

[ still working on this post ]

Saturday, April 07, 2012

This amateur cloud spotter recently noticed a unique, beautiful cloud with the appearance of a great big splash of water, as though a huge log had been tossed into a lake. The stringy, thin nature of this cloud led me to misidentify it as some type of cirrus cloud. In retrospect, that was an unwise choice; cirrus clouds are far higher than the cumulonimbus cloud to which this interesting splash of a cloud was connected.

What I initially and mistakenly believed to be cirrus clouds turned out to be an incredible splash of cumulonimbus capillatus clouds. Without The Cloudspotter’s Guide — one of my favorite weather-related books – I would not have correctly classified the big white splash painted on the blue sky.

This amazing cumulonimbus capillatus marked the western edge of a severe thunderstorm: a supercell which drove south Nashville residents into their basements and storm cellars. Having one of the few basements in our neighborhood, we had a small crowd for this exciting severe weather event. Love those storms…

NOTE: Dozens of additional photographs in this series (shot at the same time) can be seen on the recent post, Incredible capillatus clouds mark the edge of a thunderstorm

Resources: Cumulonimbus capillatus clouds

• Cumulonimbus capillatus: The Cloud Appreciation Society
• Supercell Thunderstorms
• Cumulonimbus cloud – Wikipedia
• Cumulonimbus capillatus – Chitambo.com
• Names of Clouds: Cumulonimbus capillatus
• Cumulonimbus capillatus cloud – Answers.com

This post was written on Thursday, March 22, 2012.

Although these cloud photographs are not particularly good examples of mammatus clouds, I see (or at least notice) them so rarely, they are worthwhile to this nature enthusiast. As far as I could tell, only this small patch of

These clouds were also photographed on March 14, 2012, the date of an interesting bout of severe weather in Nashville, Tennessee. For hours on end, the sky seemed to present photo op after photo op.

These shots were taken just before dining at the Noodles restaurant there at Green Hills Mall next to Ruby Tuesday.

Photo gallery: Post-storm clouds at sunset in Nashville

Resources: Mammatus clouds at sunset

• Mammatus cloud – Wikipedia
• The Cloud Appreciation Society

This post was edited on Thursday, March 22, 2012; Sunday, April 15, 2012…

Set 1 | Set 2 | Set 3 | Set 4

Set #2: Western edge of looming thunderstorm – Nashville cloud photography (3/14/2012)

NOTE: Set #1 photos — entitled Incredible clouds at the edge of a thunderstorm — were uploaded to Flickr, but they took up the rest of the maximum space allowed for free Flickr accounts! No more Flickr…)

These are dramatic, beautiful images of the western edge of the thunderhead — comprised of thick, billowing, cumulonimbus clouds — which drove a small but severe thunderstorm cell through Brentwood, TN in the late afternoon hours.

These storm-cloud images (shown in the photo gallery below) represent Set #1 of the Nashville, TN cloud photography by Stephen Frasier taken in the late afternoon hours of Wednesday, March 14, 2012.

Set 1 | Set 2 | Set 3 | Set 4 | Set 5 | Set 6

Set #1: Incredible capillatus clouds – Nashville cloud photography (3/14/2012)

What I noticed first regarding today’s interesting weather developments was a highly unusual, triangle-shaped burst of cumulonimbus capillatus clouds (previously misidentified as cirrus clouds) to the southwest, in an arrangement not often seen. I later learned that these unusual, splashing capillatus clouds marked the far western edge of a looming thunderstorm cell, yet to be noticed by this photographer.

After a few minutes, it became apparent that these cumulonimbus capillatus clouds were only a sliver of a much wider photogenic section of sky; those clouds marked only the western edge of a huge, billowing, looming thunderhead: the edge of a small but severe thunderstorm that raced through Brentwood, TN late this afternoon.

I took many photographs of the western edge of the thunderhead – billows of cumulus clouds being illuminated by the setting sun.