Hey everybody! I’ve been a long-time member on Faunaclassifieds (since 2005, username snowgyre) and finally decided to pull the trigger on these forums. I’ve been a MM member for a while now. I’ve been a small hobbyist breeder of ball pythons for the past decade, and before then I worked heavily with leopard geckos. I only produce a few clutches a year.
I live in south Georgia (USA) and work as a wildlife professor at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. If any of you guys have weird wildlife questions feel free to ask, trust me, there’s very little I haven’t already heard. I will warn you though, if you do an internet search for me I am not the porn star, don’t click on those links unless you’re older than 18, alright? Haha!
Glad to be on board and hope to see you all around.
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Welcome to the community! How cool that you’re a wildlife professor. Do any of your students ever tell you wild stories of the wildlife they’ve come across? Do you have any wild stories?
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Oh yeah, I’ve got a lot of stories! Some are proprietary biologist stories that are hilarious if you’re in the field but would probably horrify the typical Joe on the street, lol. Here’s a relatively tame one though.
Every year we have a mandatory summer session where we take two, one-week field trips, one to Sapelo Island, Georgia, and the other to Highlands, North Carolina. The objective is to expose students to as many habitat types and wildlife species as possible. Every year an informal goal of the Sapelo trip is to catch an armadillo by hand. Not sure why, it’s a southern thing I guess, lol. Well, I was asleep on the couch because we had a big group that year, when I hear some students shuffling inside the front door in the middle of the night. I hear the door to the men’s dorm room open and close. A minute or so later, all hell breaks loose as someone shouts in that typical southern drawl, “there’s a f***ing armadillo in here!” About twenty guys spend the next half hour trying to catch this thing in the dorm room, it was hilarious. The armadillo was released unharmed afterwards.
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You sound like one cool guy for sure! Glad we’ve got people like you in our community and I think I’ve actually conversed with you before on the fauna classifieds a few times haha. Small world isnt it
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Old Fauna’s been my staple forever, so yeah we probably have chatted at some point, lol. I still post pretty regularly there. What’s your Fauna username?
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Don’t use it anymore. Stopped using it pretty recently but I remeber seeing your name around
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Nice to meet another old fart.
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@snowgyre It’s good to welcome another ‘old fart’ and wildlife professional to MM. I’m in the management side (vs academia) and out West but we probably got started in the hobby around the same time (A WC adult import BP was my first snake in 94, my first boa shortly after marrying in 99, and bred my first snakes [Cal Kings] in 2001).
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I actually started with green anoles, a pair of iguanas, an unknown Lacerta species I still haven’t found to this day, a crocodile gecko, and some native frogs in the 1990s. This was back when you could still win iguanas at county fair booths (I’m glad that practice has since been banned, the iguanas were never in good condition). I worked with leopard geckos for several years until graduate school field work made it tough. I wasn’t really interested in ball pythons until the early 2000s and I got my first pair in 2008.
I lived in Montana for two years, did my M.S. at Montana State University, actually. I’m in academia but the nice thing about a small baccalaureate program (vs. a research institution) is that we’re heavily focused on wildlife and land management, as most of our students are employed with southern hunting plantations, land management NGOs (The Orianne Society, The Nature Conservancy, The Jones Center, Tall Timbers, etc.), and the state Department of Natural Resources. I prefer it that way, I feel that some researchers get so focused on a particular project they lose sight of the big, practical picture.
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@snowgyre 
My first reptiles were actually a pair of green anoles (from Walmart–glad that stopped, too) sometime around 89. Hopefully we get to swap some stories
Wow that’s a while back. It’s weird to think I was only 6 years old when that show took place. How time flys when you’re having fun…
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Hello and welcome! I also recently pulled the trigger on moving over here. I’ve seen you around Fauna, my username there is Charis. Great to see some people I recognize around here!
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