After breakfast the next morning we headed back to the bottoms for another look around the place.  It was a sunny day with few clouds, and was already getting hot in the early morning hours.  We came into the Bottoms from another entrance, and driving along we had a pretty good view down into the ditches running alongside.  There was no more than perhaps six inches of water in the ditch, which made it easy to spot a number of Redeared Sliders and Painted Turtles as they crawled along.  We also spotted several large snappers in the right-hand ditch.  As they crawled along they would stick their heads under water and swing them from side to side, as if they were looking for something to munch on. 

Then in the left-hand ditch I spotted not just another snapper, but the biggest I've ever seen in thirty years of snapping turtles.  This creature was an absolute behemoth.  I estimated the carapace length to be in excess of sixteen inches.  Like the other smaller snappers, this one was patrolling the shallows, occasionally dipping his head underneath the surface.  We watched this monster for a while as it slowly moved along.  I took a lot of pictures but unfortunately a camera malfunction trashed a whole roll, so I ended up with just a couple fair shots.  I've been putting off upgrading to a digital camera, and now my procrastination had caught up with me at a most inopportune moment.

Eventually we got back in the vehicle and moved along.  It wasn't more than a few minutes before we saw a serpentine form in the middle of the road - Massasauga!  Woo!   A large female Western Massasauga, flattened out to soak up some heat off the road.  We stopped and carefully approached her - I managed to snap off a photo of her in situ before she coiled at our approach.   She was clad in the colors of the country - dusty greys, tans, and browns.  Her mid-dorsal blotches were cleanly defined, and directly underneath was a second set with blurred and irregular borders that looked airbrushed on.  This beauty was a life lister for all of us.  We took her picture and admired her for a while and then let her go on about her business.

Nothing else presented itself on the rest of the drive-through except for more great birds - Ruddy Turnstones, Blackbellied Plovers, and more American Avocets.  We also spotted a Glossy Ibis, and were able to get the binocs on this bird for a while before it took off.  Another great life-lister for Steve!

The day was warming up and our time in Kansas was drawing short.  We decided to try our luck on some of the road cuts we had herped on the second day - they were close by, and on the way home.  We didn't have quite the same success - the past few days had been a lot warmer, and the soil had dried out considerably.  We did find two gentilis - a juvenile and an adult.  The adult looked very similar to an adult we saw on the second day - perhaps it was the same snake?

Gentilis.  Photo by Rick Milas.

An east-west roadcut produced a very colorful young Collared Lizard, but that was all.  By now it was eleven, and getting quite hot.  We decided to start heading back east and herp the way home, as it were.  The hottest part of the day could be spent traveling, and then we could use the late afternoon and evening to revisit some of the spots we had worked on the first day...