Plains Box Turtles and a Gopher Snake

I was recently storm chasing in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, where I saved four box turtles crossing the highways I was on. This one is an ornate box turtle (Terrapene ornata). He had shut himself down in the middle of the road after a close call with a car tire going 65. He was in a puddle of his own urine, a common box turtle defense when alarmed.


I found this gopher snake (Pituophis catenifer) on the side of a farm road in Greensburg, Kansas, about 2 hours before an almost 2-mile-wide EF-5 tornado struck. He probably did not survive if he didn't get himself down a hole, as pretty much everything above ground was scoured from the face of the Earth by the monster wedge tornado.