Andy Snider, Fresno Chaffee Zoo's director of animal care and conservation, is in Armenia to tag and track Armenian vipers. Snider is a nationally known expert on reptiles and amphibians. Snider is in Armenia until Sept. 10 and is sharing his experiences with readers of The Bee.

Andy's Armenia Adventure
Part 3, 28 August 2008

Well, we never went to the City Center last night, because our hosts didn't have any gasoline to spare. Most (or maybe all?) of the gasoline ("petrol") in Armenia comes through Georgia, and the conflict there with Russia has kept any gasoline from making it to the country for a while now. Most stations are closed, and the few that have gasoline aren't selling it for money, but rather for "checks," which I'm assuming is something like a gasoline rationing card. You can only purchase a small amount with these cards at one time. We have enough to get us to our study site (so far), but not for anything else.

They tell us that perhaps next week they'll be more back to normal, and we might then plan our trip to the southern Meghri region to find the unusual Armenian viper color morphs that are found there. I'll keep my fingers crossed...

In the meantime, we went to the study site today to locate the transmittered snakes. We found all of them in record time (~3 hours), using the car more than in the past to get closer to each specimen so we didn't have to walk miles in between. The snakes were very cooperative! We've lost the signal entirely to the one specimen that was located a few days ago down in a rock quarry which we couldn't get into. So that specimen may be gone forever.

Most of the snakes appear to be moving back toward the areas where they hibernate for the winter -- their "dens." Most of the snakes should be denning up by the end of September, so it's interesting to be here later in the season than in past years to see the animals returning from wherever they were during their busy season.

It's about 8:25 pm here in Armenia, exactly 12 hours later than in Fresno. I have no idea what we're doing for dinner tonight so I think I'll sign off for the evening. Then there's always CNN on TV, and yet more of the Democratic National Convention... :-)

Andy