Introduction

Hey everybody! Welcome to the new & improved Tennessee Herp of the Day blog! For a while now, I've been posting a herp of the day on my Facebook semi-regularly, in the hope of educating the general public about all the interesting critters that can be found right here in the great state of Tennessee. (I plan to also eventually do a bird of the day, mammal of the day, scary-looking insect of the day, etc.)

(Before I go any farther, I should clarify that "herp" is a slang word that's used whenever you're talking about reptiles & amphibians together. It's a really stupid word, but so far nobody has come up with anything better, so we're stuck with it.)

In any case, Tennessee has a pretty substantial diversity of reptiles & amphibians, which can be broken down like this:

22 species of frogs

57 species of salamanders

1 species of crocodile

17 species of turtles

10 species of lizards

37 species of snakes

Total: 144 species

(I should clarify that a few of those species are tentative, in that they've never been officially recorded from Tennessee but it's reasonably likely that they do occur here and just haven't been seen yet.)

As you can see, salamanders are where we really shine. I haven't looked this up to be sure, but I'd suspect Tennessee probably has the 2nd-highest number of salamander species of any state, behind North Carolina. We also have a lot of snakes, but our lizard representation is pretty weak.

OK, so how does this "herp of the day" thing work? My goal is to put up a post about one species each day, which will contain a photo or two, links to webpages with information on the species, and some personal comments of my own. If I stay on top of things, we can knock the whole thing out in 144 days, right? We'll see.

So that's that. I'll put up my first post later today. Have fun!