Tiny and usually very well hidden, thankfully they call frequently and loudly, otherwise we'd never find them. So far we've found them in marshy areas and vegetation next to small and large ponds that are also being used by much larger species (eg. Hylarana guentheri).
So far this is the most common snake we have found whilst out at night. We've seen them next to forest trails, in gardens, inside storm drains, on walls, next to road curbs and climbing trees and shrubs.
Luckily we spotted this small juvenile hiding under our car wheels before we drove off, I managed to collect it and put it in a safer hiding spot in the nearby trees.
Not great shots, but it was interesting watching it slowly hunt through the strange pile of fibreglass fruit that was left in our garden.
Eventually it emerged with a very large Asian common toad in it's mouth, hissing and flicking its tail in a very agitated way, we backed away to not disturb it further.
This snake was extensively hunting up and down through this small channel and into the adjacent ponds, but totally ignored this Asian common toad.
Another fairly common Hong Kong species. We've found them in a wide variety of habitats throughout the SAR, in cultivated fields, mountain marshes and even brackish mangrove areas.
Often sympatric with Amolops hongkongensis & Odorrana chloronota, we've only ever found them in or next to mountain streams. These are one of the more common frogs we have observed.
We've not found these in many places at all, in fact they eluded our extensive searches for a long time. So far we've found them to be very localised and only in a few shallow, gravel bottomed hill streams.
We've been carefully measuring suctions disk to finger ratios of all the Amolops that we find, so if this article is correct; www0.hku.hk/ecology/porcupine/por32/32-vert-3-frog.htm
then this would be a new recording outside of Lantau for this species in the Hong Kong territory.
We've heard these more often than we've actually managed to see them. They seem to call from very marshy areas with dense plant growth. The ones we've managed to photograph have been on paths at reasonable distances from water, high up in mountains and right down to sea level.
Seems to call very infrequently and so far we've only seen or heard them in this one place. Was hidden in dense undergrowth in a marsh.
We've not heard or seen these in many places, but when we have found them they are there in quite large numbers.
They seem to often be in quite short grass.
nb. This species has recently undergone some genetic boundary divisions and definition changes (Matsui et al. 2005). Previously M. ornata was listed as occurring in Hong Kong, but now this species is listed as restricted to the Indian Subcontinent and M. fissipes is the SE Asia and Chinese species. Most online data still reports M. ornata for Hong Kong.
We've been carefully measuring suctions disk to finger ratios of all the Amolops that we find, so if this article is correct; www0.hku.hk/ecology/porcupine/por32/32-vert-3-frog.htm
then this would be a new recording outside of Lantau for this species in the Hong Kong territory.
