We happily descended to the desert for the night. After repeatedly seeing an adult glossy that was bent on being caught or run over despite efforts to place him off the road, we saw this very neat snake edging onto the road:

We met up with Fundad and jumped in the back of his truck to spotlight hillsides/cuts. The two snakes we would see thought they would ridicule our extra efforts by lying smack in the middle of the road. The first was this adult longnose:

The next find was great. Spotlighting off to the side, we saw an owl, then another, then two more darting around. They were after something. Fundad slammed on the brakes and we finally looked in front of us at the defensive ball of a huge boa in the road. The owls almost had this gravid female.

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Charina/ Lichanura trivirgata gracia x roseofusca

The next morning Yani was kind enough to meet up with us in Riverside for a chance at daytime boas. It was dry and it heated up quickly and boas were not about but it was neat to experience the "flip side" of boa hunting (bad pun intended), a we did see a target:

We also saw many spinys and whiptails, and John scared up a whipsnake.

From there, we went to the desert to find chucks and other lizard species.

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Habitat, near Yucca Valley

The first find was this gravid leopard lizard:

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Gambelia wislizenii, pics by Mike

We then saw a DOR mitchelli and this target lizard, who made a very poor crack choice:

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Sauromalus ater

We saw another chuck, a monster, that we failed to capture, although we came close.

About an hour before dark, I ran to drop Mike offon the way back, great basin gophers had been on the road and recent DORs were seemingly everywhere. One male was right next to another, likely female DOR gopher. He was huge for this subspecies at 5Â 9". We met up with Fundad once more to drive a wash. Temperatures were great and the area was beautifulÂa classic boa hunting experience. At about twilight, Chad hollers as off to the side of the wash, an attractive male desert rosy boa is stretched out. What a beautiful sight:

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Charina/ Lichanura trivirgata gracia

During our photo session, a desert horned lizard situated nearby couldnÂt hold still any longer and broke his camoflauge defense by running right in front of us:

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Phrynosoma platyrhinos calidiarum

Continued in Part III...