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Photo courtesy Alachua County Visitors & Convention Bureau
Chicken turtle found in a roadside canal

Chicken turtle found in a roadside canal

Photo by Suzanna Mars

Sunshine Serpents Wildlife Tour, Anywhere, Florida

Herping with expert herpetologist and naturalist Daniel Parker

by Suzanna Mars | August 17, 2011

2 Comments

Daniel Parker meets me at the back of a fast food restaurant at five in the afternoon.  At a time when most people are headed home from work, Daniel Parker and I are headed off on a wildlife tour that in the space of a few hours will redefine what Florida means to me.

Many of those who speak of the “real” Florida—and I have been among them—know not from what they speak.  Not until they have experienced the state through its ecology and its animals can one see what has been largely invisible and what is truly “real.”  The “real” Florida, or the “natural” Florida, is not simply measured in the distance between urban and rural or between indoor and outdoor.

The “real” Florida is not merely the outdoors.  That’s too easy.  Undeveloped Florida is the same as undeveloped Idaho; it’s simply undeveloped.  The “real” Florida exists in its wildlife and its habitats, in those areas where human and industrial run-off have not contaminated the waterways and the soil and where building has not endangered precious habitats.

The “real” Florida is where Daniel Parker thrives.  Professionally, he is known as the proprietor of Sunshine Serpents (Brooksville, FL), a homegrown enterprise that is now a full-time business.  Mr. Parker is a well-spoken 29-year-old former music teacher who has seen his reptile business grow from hobby into going concern as he works with conservation groups, universities, filmmakers, and photographers. 

He breeds snakes in captivity and he hunts them in the wild.

Properly speaking, what Mr. Parker took me on a few weeks ago was a “hunt,” a term that Mr. Parker uses because he equates it to “understanding the behavior and activity periods of your quarry.”  It’s also known in the trade as “herping,” and it can involve more than snakes. To that end, Mr. Parker took me on a road cruise that involved miles of rural dirt roads and Mr. Parker’s incredibly precise vision.

We were looking for snakes, although we started out looking in a small roadside canal for chicken turtles (see picture).  Mr. Parker found the chicken turtle without much effort on a lime rock road that was glowing in the late afternoon sun.  Where exactly this was must remain undisclosed; like many field herpetologists Mr. Parker asks that the location be kept under wraps lest too many interested parties trample through the area, removing or endangering its precious species.

After encountering the turtle, we drove into progressively more rural areas until we came upon a road that ran into a marsh.  Mr. Parker and I left his van to walk the marsh for a bit and then we returned to it so that Mr. Parker could drive, at increasingly faster speeds, the half-mile or so between the end of the road and where we had entered it.   Back and forth we went.  We were looking for snakes and we quickly found them.  Mr. Parker has a raptor’s eye for a snake, and within a few minutes he had jumped out of the van to catch a Gulf Salt Marsh Snake (Nerodia clarkii clarkii) that was thermoregulating on the road.  Thermoregulating is the process by which the ectothermic snake attempts to keep its body temperature within specific temperature boundaries. I have no idea how Mr. Parker saw this snake, which was six inches long and the width of two pencils, with brown longitudinal stripes. For the casual observer and those driving past in a car, the snake would be mistaken for a stick.  Within a minute I was on my belly photographing it (it’s non-venomous).  Mr, Parker made clear that the better picture would be the one not taken from above of a stretched-out snake.

Back in the car, we began to cruise again.  Not five minutes had passed before Mr. Parker braked again and rushed out to watch a dusky pygmy rattlesnake (Sistrurus miliarius barbouri).  This little snake was venomous and it is responsible for most of the venomous snakebites in Florida.  It, too, had come out in the late afternoon to sit on the heat of the roadway.  It blended it nearly perfectly with the rough gray gravel of the pavement, something that I made note of since I am a frequent and ambitious walker. The little mottled snake with the thick midsection has a rattle that sounds like the buzz of an insect although they generally do not use this rattle defensively.  Rather than rattle, it twitched its head from side to side.

The pygmy duly photographed and recorded, we continued to ride the same road looking for additional specimens.  Over the next half an hour, we saw another Gulf Salt Marsh snake before stopping for a break at a gas station and convenience store.

As the sky darkened, Mr. Parker drove along unlit paved roads, using his GPS for navigation.  These roads were continuously bordered by forest, with grassy rights-of way on the sides.  We passed a mid-sized Florida cottonmouth (Agkistrodon piscivorous conanti) that I never saw and that Mr. Parker did; in a flash we were out of the car running towards the area where Mr. Parker said he had seen the head of the venomous snake emerging from the grass.  He took a bright LED flashlight and his tongs down into the grass while I shined (ineffectually, I might add) my own LED light into the ankle-deep grass.  The snake got away, but we soon came across another.  We repeated the procedure:  Mr. Parker spied the snake and we were once again stopping fast and rushing from the vehicle.  This time, Mr. Parker caught up to his quarry and we stood in the dark road admiring it while I attempted to get a photograph before returning to the hunt alongside what appeared to be a very productive roadway.

The cottonmouth is a semi-aquatic snake with an over-reported aggression and fearsome display that ranges as far north as Virginia and which is ubiquitous in this area of Florida.  I learned of its swimming ability in both fresh and salt water; it has colonized islands that include one just offshore at Cedar Key.  As a juvenile, it is frequently mistaken for a copperhead and as an adult it is mistaken for the non-venomous banded water snakes (or the other way around).  I had only seen a neonate cottonmouth in the wild before.

Over the next hour, we encountered another medium-sized cottonmouth that writhed along the road.  I’d always expected to run into this snake, which is named for the white interior of its mouth, near water, but here we’d seen three at the edge of the road, near grass.  Somehow, Mr. Parker managed to see a tiny Florida Scarlet snake (Cemophora coccinea coccinea) as it edged onto the dark roadway.  It is only found on the Florida peninsula.  The snake was a light grayish-white, with what is known as “blotching” that to the layman would be called banding, in red and black.  We found it a bit more northerly than its usual habitat would suggest.

Too soon, the tour was over and we were headed back to my car.  This was Mr. Parker’s summer tour.  In the winter, the tours involve more hiking and “flipping,” which involves flipping over rocks and other cover objects.  Mr. Parker leads tours throughout Florida and will customize according to the preferences of his clients.  Those clients are international and often come back for repeat visits.  They may have specific interests in reptiles, be naturalists, photographers, or simply people who want to do “something different.”  Mr. Parker is a crack photographer (see Web site) with pro credentials who is happy to instruct on the best way to photographically capture a snake.  He can identify all snakes in Florida and those hardest to find are a thrill:  the King, pine, and the hognose snake with the upturned snout that plays dead when confronted with a threat.

As we stood out on the dark road with our flashlights, I had a new appreciation for what exists beside and beneath us. We share this habitat with all manner of animals, many of which we either never see or which we pass by unknowingly.  We are on their terrain and not the other way around; they were here first.  Mr. Parker’s tours give a new appreciation for conservation and preservation.  This is especially important in Florida, where rapid and rampant development occurred at the cost of wildlife.  Mr. Parker’s primary interest is in seeing and photographing reptiles in the wild.  He holds a venomous permit that has required 1000 hours of supervised study to obtain; the rest of his knowledge comes from self-study.  Like many other self-trained herpetologists, Mr. Parker worked in a reptile specialty store (while studying music at college).  His Sunshine Serpents business involves not just wildlife tours but school presentations and educational seminars at Repticon conventions throughout the Southeast.  Soon, he will begin work on a roadway study program with a local college to learn about the impact of the roadway on the area’s wildlife.

The tourism industry, especially in Florida, has overused the expression “the adventure of a lifetime.”  It gets applied to all kinds of mild diversions that are anything but.  Mr. Parker claims no such hyperbolic feat for his tour and yet it is one of those not-to-be-missed experiences that separate adventure-tour wheat from chaff.   This is one eco-tour that should be on everyone’s Florida vacation to-do list.  Mr. Parker arranges tours throughout the state after discussing the tour with the client and organizing it to meet client needs with client convenience in mind.  Fall is an especially good time to tour Northern Florida, since there is a larger presence of the venomous snakes that give such a frisson of excitement.   September, Mr. Parker says, is a great and often overlooked time to see the snakes from the Viperidae family.  There is, he says, never a tour where nothing is seen.

A Sunshine Serpents tour can easily be arranged from the Gainesville area. The tours run $150.00 for a half day and $250.00 for a full day for one person, with $50.00 for each additional person.  Call 863-441-5067 for an appointment.


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Suzanna Mars

Suzanna Mars came to Gainesville in 2008 after spending over 20 years in San Francisco.… more



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2 Comments

Jan van den Berg

August 17, 2011 - 2:10 pm

As a tourist, i live in Amsterdam The Netherlands, i have done the tour many times, every year the tour is the higlight from the vacation, i can recomend this tour to every American or tourist from living out of the US, it is an experience some one will never forget.

Jan van den Berg,
Amsterdam The Netherlands.

Dr. Dan Rieck

August 18, 2011 - 9:29 am

I know Daniel on a more personal level and not as a client. As a fellow outdoors enthusiast I can attest to his love, respect, and knowledge of reptiles and all animals alike.  Not many people understand the brittle ecosystem of Florida quite like him and his desire to protect it as much as possible.  We both share that common interest as well.



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