Funny that you've never seen the Macroprotodon cucullatus in the wild during all your trips there and then suddenly finding a whole bunch!

Never been there but what I can see in the pictures it's a beautifull island.

I've been to your site multiple times and always enjoy reading your reports.

Thanks!

Tim Leerschool 

Thanks! To me it was surprising as well since I've been on that island many times but always in summer. I know a lot of people who went to look for this snake in summer and never found any either, now in autumn it was just turning the right stones. 

it is the same for many species, even for natrix! (Bobby remember Lemnos ;-)
Very nice report, I'm jealous :-) 

Nice report Bobby!, heres mine: http://mwilsonherps.wordpress.com/trip-reports/menorca/

I appreciated just how difficult it was to find that snake in Mallorca in August, amazing how a cooler season can make all the difference... 

Seems I'm rrreally getting old, as my little story comes in last. For as far I have anything to add to the 2 excellent reports of my travel buddies, here's mine =>

http://www.hylawerkgroep.be/jeroen/index.php?id=54

 

Cool, thanx a lot guys for sharing, it's great to have 3 different points of view! 

The more the better, love your reports buddy's! 

One silly question from me:
You say Stripeless Tree Frog, but on your report I see only Hylas with stripe! Like arborea. There are not like these ones: http://www.herp.it/SpeciesPages/HylaMerid.htm
(except this one: http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/3069/post54.jpg )

Why's that? 

The small island just before the harbour of port d'Addaia is called Ses Mones, and the Podarcis lilfordi population was supposed to be extinct since the 1990s, due to Podarcis siculus.

The last three years I did some surveys on this island, and in the next issue of "Die Eidechse" Mike Zawadzki and I will present our results. It is actually a sympatric population of both lilfordi and siculus, which is quite interesting.

Marten van den Berg 

Interesting indeed, Marten. We (or at least I) only spotted 5-10 lilfordi's. Don't you fear that this lilfordi population will become extinct? 

For just half an hour you were very lucky to spot that amount of lizards!
On some bad days, I did see sometimes only one or two.
In our article we make an population estimation of 60 specimens based on 39 observed animals. The siculus population is far less, we did found only 5 specimens.
For the extinction part, actual this is a rather moderate size population, with no imminent threats. The siculus did not take over control in the past 15-20 years, and we recently found an much smaller population of only 6 specimens.
See www.lacerta.de: Small,smaller,smallest article in the Balearcs section.

If you don't have acces to the Die Eidechse I can send you the text of the article to your personal mail, if interested. 

-> Illias, off course it does sound a bit contradictionary; a stripeless treefrog with a stripe but it isn't that rare at all. In some populations some individuals have more stripes then others, but also in H. arborea you often see individuals without stripes. In of the biggest populations in the Netherlands you often see arborea's without a stripe. Just some individual variation in my opinion ;-) 

Thanks for the answer Bobby.
I thought maybe it was an introduced arborea population, because I "knew" that Hyla meridionalis lacks of stripe. 

Well, Ilias, I have to admit that I was also rather surprised at first, because many of them were like that. But many called and that made things obvious.

Remember also one from Doñana that Wouter showed in a report here.
http://www.euroherp.com/Field/spain3.html

I have the impression that meridionalis is somewhat more 'flexible' than arborea, cf. the crazy morphs from the Canaries and the speckled mimicry ones that Bobby, Wouter and me saw last summer near Genova. Maybe this has something to do with island or -in the Genova case- peripherical populations being genetically less diverse, due to having been founded by few(er) individuals? 

To be more clear: Wouter's 'Hyla arborea molleri' is in fact a meridionalis too (see comment by Luis). 

I personally also think the meridionalis lateral stripe looks not the same as the arborea one, although I cannot really put it into words. 

>...although I cannot really put it into words.

Even though I cannot see a difference at first look, I know what you mean.