South Florida... This is a place that has a ton of exotic animals running around. Fortunately most of them stay in developed areas so they pose no more threat to native wildlife than man does. In some cases they are just an additional food source for some of our natives. My friend Alex and I went down there specifically to find some of these wild animals from all around the world. We found species from SE Asia, Madagascar, Yemen, the Caribbean, central America, and Africa! I have to admit it was pretty exciting finding all these wild animals out there. Now, not every species we found is super common, in fact many are very localized and are pretty difficult to find. If you're interested finding stuff, I'd say shining is best for lizards and road cruising is best for snakes. You can certainly find some snakes while shining though and I prefer to shine up nocturnal snakes that way.
We made a weekend trip out of it and searched night and day. Both of us were on a bit of a budget and I don't like spending money anyway when I don't have to... right? Besides, we were spending so much time looking for animals that we would only be sleeping a few hours at night and few hours in the heat of the day. Basically we would pick a location that we felt safe and sleep for a few hours in the early morning until the sun came up, then we'd go look for some animals and when it got too hot in the day we would head to a park and go full hobo and sleep in the park for a few hours. We got some stares but we would just repeat a common phrase of the trip to each other, "We're freaks baby! We don't care!" Sleep deprivation got us a little delirious and there was no filter on what we would say. It was a little bit hysterical.
It turns out all the hard work was worth it cause we found a lot of cool animal and we found them all in the wild. So until next time find a new way to appreciate nature!
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