Symi July 2019. Dry, hot and barren

Having been to Symi island, East Aegean, and found a large male Ottoman Viper Montivipera xanthina, was enough motivation to go there again. OK, August is not the best of months to do it, but when this is the time of the year that you have your holidays, then you muster all of your confidence and optimism, and go. That was also true for Matt Wilson, a regular visitor of Symi and its reptiles, so we both decided to give it a try in August, half of it normal holidays, half herping.

It proved more frustrating than last time. And very exhausting. Heat was intense so we decided to swim by day and search by night, twilight and early morning. Not much with scales was on the move. One of the commonest lizards and very heat tolerant is the Starred Agama Stellagama stellio. We saw them on the rock walls by day, and found them sleeping in them by night. One night we found one on a small tree sleeping.

Stellagama (Laudakia) stellio sleeping at the edge of a Kermes Oak branch. They do it some times to avoid snakes and ground predators

Matt photographing the sleeping Agama

Stellagama stellio sleeping in a stone wall. They slept in a different crevice each night

Walking in the early morning we found some snake skins, some of them in really good condition

Dolichophis jugularis skin with its large eyes. Unfortunately, even if Dolichophis was the only snake active all day long, we were not able to catch one

One morning, we found the fresh skin of a large Montivipera xanthina. We returned to the same spot all days and nights after this, but nothing.

A freshly shed skin of Montivipera xanthina. But no snake.

Matt making a photo of the large Montivipera xanthina skin

Even with lizards, we were not so lucky. We saw the usual species, but they were very fast and shy. A lot of them were babies, the adults were hiding away.

baby Ophisops elegans

baby Anatololacerta pelasgiana

Matt stumbled upon a small Eirenis modestus one afternoon, the blotched morph. Not bad!

Eirenis modestus. They come in two morphs: one uniform, which is the commonest, and the blotched which is the rarest

At night, we walked slowly at some distance from each other, searching with the torches, looking all the stone walls and more. Two species of geckos were present, but not very common

Hemidactylus turcicus was one of the two geckos present on Symi, not very common

Mediodactylus oertzeni was the other one, rather commoner than Hemidactylus, at least on natural landscape where we were searching

We also found a Testudo graeca aestivating, an animal that had dug in the middle of a stone wall and was sleeping there. It was the only tortoise we found, apart from an empty carapace.

Testudo graeca aestivating in a stone wall under a tree

the animal had dug and half-buried itself in the loose soil between the stones

Telescopus fallax found one night moving slowly along the ground, under oak trees

The highlight of these days was this male Montivipera xanthina found also under oak trees

Montivipera xanthina, a beauty

Being about 70 cm long, this was not the biggest Montivipera we had seen, but was beautiful indeed, as are most Symi vipers. They tend to have those rectangular blotches that put them apart from other island vipers

In conclusion, there were too few things moving on the island in July heat, even by night. We had only three species of snake photographed, sweating all day and all night. And of course, one more time, no Hemorrhois nummifer, one of the main targets of the trip. Next time we go there will be spring.