chartreuse_plaidypus's Identifications

REVISED NOTES (1/25/24): Three observations I have recently uploaded (Glossy Snake, Spotted Chorus Frog, and Red-spotted Toad) come from old scanned slides, all from the same roll with an erroneous (late) stamped date of "Jan 80" on the slide mounts. The creatures were apparently photographed on a green lawn, which implies (a) that they may have been captured locally and photographed before release, (b) that they were documented during the growing season. I have assumed that they were all photographed by me in person. The set of three species have partially overlapping ranges which I thought would help me pin down the location and--with the aid of supplemental field notes--a possible date of occurrence. Unfortunately, searches of all my field notes and calendars have failed to find any mention of these occurrences. My field notes almost certainly would have made mention of a Glossy Snake documented in hand.
Assuming (a) that the images are actually my own, and (b) that the images were taken sometime within a year prior to the stamped date on the mounts (e.g. Jan 1979 - Jan 1980), I looked at all my field work for this period and tried to narrow down the possibilities. Aside from local (Austin area) birding notes, I found documentation of 18 field trips and excursions during this period which span a wide swath of Texas and one trip to n.e. Arizona. I can eliminate 15 of the 18 field trips because they occurred in the cold seasons and/or were well out of the range of one or more of the three species (e.g. no Red-spotted Toads occur in East Texas, etc.). I am left with three field excursions as possibilities:

1. I made a birding trip to West Texas (mostly Big Bend NP) May 12-19, 1979. During that trip, my friends and I did some road cruising after local thunderstorms in the desert on two dates. On May 18, I listed encounters with a Glossy Snake and an abundance of Red-spotted Toads on the roads between the Chisos Basin and Rio Grande Village. That is intriguing, but I make no mention of whether any were photographed. Moreover, no species of Chorus Frog is mentioned in those notes, and none is known to occur in the Big Bend of Texas. As intriguing as this possibility is, I discount it as a source of the observations.
2. From October 1-11, 1979, I did extensive field work in the Kayenta-Black Mesa region in northeast Arizona. That field work includes regular help lists, but none of the three species are mentioned and no chorus frog is mapped as occurring in the region. I discount this field effort.
3. From May 28-31, 1979, I did field work in Palo Pinto County, Texas, on/near the Worth Ranch on the Brazos River downstream of Possum Kingdom Reservoir. Although I have no herp lists from those efforts, I had previously scanned and uploaded a small number of snake, lizard, and frog observations which were documented with slides from that work. They are on a roll with a date stamp of "Jul 79" but are necessarily from the late May field work, the only time I visited the area that year. A careful perusal of readily available herp records (iNaturalist, Werler & Dixon 2000, etc.) suggests that Glossy Snake has NOT been documented in Palo Pinto County, although it has been documented in Comanche and Shackelford counties a few counties to the south and west and others to the north on the Red River. Both Spotted Chorus Frog and Red-spotted Toad have been documented in Palo Pinto County although they are apparently uncommon.

Did I photograph the above three species in Palo Pinto County, then leave the roll of film in a camera for several more months before developing it? This now seems unlikely. I have other personal field photos (slides) dated after the May 1979 field work and before the "Jan 80" time stamp on the subject slides, suggesting I exposed and developed other film in the interim. Curiously, the eight slides documenting the three herp species are the only slides I have in my collection with a stamp of "Jan 80"; the remainder of the roll they were on are absent. That is suspicious. I'm a pack rat; I rarely throw out slides--only extremely blurred ones of no value.

All the above lead me to question one of my basic assumptions, that these are my own slides. I accomplished the field work in Palo Pinto County with a companion field biologist who was an avid herper. I don't know what other field work he did nor if he would have given me the slides for my collection. Of more concern, I have in my collection large numbers of slides taken by my late friend Greg Lasley from all over Texas and the World. I am usually careful to label any of Greg's slides so as not to confuse them with any of mine...but the quality of his imagery is such that I rarely have to worry about that. And now that I look closely at the eight slides documenting the three herp species--from somewhere, sometime--I cannot rule out the possibility that I received these from Greg Lasley. However, Greg himself never uploaded any records of Glossy Snake or Spotted Chorus Frog and only a single Red-spotted Toad (from 2016 in Big Bend). If he had images of these species, I'm quite certain he would have added them to the iNat database.

In the end, the uncertainty about the provenance of the eight slides and thus my "observations" of the three species must lead me to discount both the date and location I had previously ascribed to them. I'm going to leave all three observations on iNat but I will be marking both the date and location of each observation as not accurate in the DQA, relegating these observations to casual status.