Nevada's landscape is extremely diverse, from its wide open deserts and majestic mountain ranges to its dense forests and beautiful rivers and lakes.

Nevada is also full of amazing wildlife.

Today we're going to learn about the Nature Conservancy's River Fork Ranch and the western pond turtle.

Then I'll participate in the leopard frog survey and be introduced to a newly discovered species of scorpion.

I hope you're ready for some fun.

♪♪♪ I'm Connor Fields, and this is Outdoor Nevada.

♪♪♪ I'm at the River Fork Ranch Preserve, which is owned by the Nature Conservancy.

Here I met up with Mark from the Nevada Department of Wildlife.

He's conducting a western pond turtle survey.

What made you decide to get working with turtles, or did that just fall into your lap?

(Mark Enders) Really, there was a need for information.

We knew that the species was struggling range wide.

They occur from Washington state down to Baja California and Mexico.

And we didn't have any data on the turtles here in Nevada, so we had to get to work and try to learn as much as we could, because they were going to be up for endangered species listing.

-Mark got right to it.

As luck would have it, a turtle was in the trap.

-We got a turtle.

-You got a turtle?

-Yeah.

I'm gonna take this trap off, and I'll hand it to you.

-All right.

Being able to assist in these surveys is not only fun, it's important.

The different agencies throughout Nevada can always use a hand and our support, plus I kind of like the title "Citizen Scientist."

It's beautiful.

How old do you think this guy is?

-Oh, so it's interesting, because when they're younger, you can actually count rings, like a tree, but you can see that's basically polished smooth.

And those-- it's those rings that, as it grows, they're called annuli, like tree rings, and you can count them.

But eventually, when the turtle gets old enough, they've been eroded away because they're just too active in the water.

-So if you had to ballpark this one?

-Oh, I would say like 30 to 50 years would be my guess.

It's a pretty big turtle.

-He's in our age bracket.

-Yeah, absolutely.

-Can you tell if it's male or female?

-Yeah.

And so this is a female turtle.

And so there's a couple of ways.

One is the underside of the chin.

Do you see those black spots?

-Yes.

-So a male would, especially a male this old, it would be pretty uniformly yellow.

The other way you can tell is the shape of the shell.

This one is almost entirely flat across the bottom, and a male would have a divot right here.

It would be concave much more.

And then the tail is another way to tell.

Females have a much thinner tail.

-It's tucked in.

-Yeah.

They're hard to get out, very muscular.

So I'm not going to try right now, but if I really needed to, I could pull the tail out a little, and males have a fat tail, and females have a much skinnier tail.

-We'll be nice to her.

She's already stressed enough.

-Yeah.

We can get to work here.

And you know what?

This is a brand new turtle.

-Look at that!

We got a new one!

-Brand new individual, yeah.

-What should we name her?

-I'll leave that up to you.

How about Shelly?

-Shelly?

There you go.

This is a thorough examination.

All the details from size, weight, unique markings, and more, everything is logged and will eventually go into a universal database for future surveys.

The measurements and observations are very specific and detailed.

This is all followed up with images, too.

Very detailed.

Now it was time to mark, or notch, the turtle.

A specific code is filed on the outer shell of the turtle.

This code represents the year of the capture.

-And this is exactly how it's done for desert tortoises down in the Mojave.

This is how it's a time-tested way of marking turtles, because that actually won't grow back.

Even as this turtle continues to grow or if it was a small turtle, yeah, they grow from, you know, basically the margins.

But this edge here will stay the same.

I think that looks good.

What do you think?

-Yep.

-The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to check for eggs, and I'm going to put this turtle down.

-I'll keep an eye on her in case she runs.

-Yeah, I heard you're fast.

-I like my odds against the turtle.

Now, I've heard-- I've heard other-- -I've heard a story about a hare once.

-Yeah, famous last words.

Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put fingers into her abdomen here so I can actually kind of come under the plastron scutes there.

And she's got eggs.

-Oh, wow!

-Yeah.

So that's a good sign.

-How many eggs will she lay?

-It's a good question.

I would say, I only feel a couple right now, but, you know, there's, I would say, precedent for, you know, up to eight eggs.

And she'll come onto the land, dig a shallow depression, lay those eggs in a sunny spot, because you know she's gonna leave.

She can't incubate them anyway.

She's a reptile.

So you know, she'll cover them up with dirt and walk away.

And then it's up to the elements to incubate those eggs.

So it tends to be a sunny location, somewhat close to water, because when those little turtles come out, that's the first place they're going to beeline is in the water.

Let's go ahead and check "yes" for eggs, and then that's all we've got for this girl.

I'm going to go let her back in the water, because I don't want to stress her out any longer.

-With the data noted and images taken, it was time to return the turtle back to the river.

Bye, Shelly!

-That's a wrap.

-I feel so honored that I could be here when you find a new turtle.

-Yeah, that was excellent.

And one with eggs.

That's the first one that I've had this trapping session that was carrying eggs.

So that's always exciting, because that is good news for the future of the species at this site.

-I love it.

Thank you so much for showing me this stuff.

I had a blast.

-Me too.

-And, yeah, I can't thank you enough.

-Excellent.

-From here, we headed south for another survey.

Today I'm meeting up with Corey, a biologist with the Bureau of Land Management.

He's working on something pretty interesting here at an undisclosed location in Southern Nevada, and I'm hoping I can lend a hand.

Let's go see what he's got going on.

This isn't the first time we've tagged along with Corey.

He's been a part of a few Outdoor Nevada adventures.

Today it's all about frogs.

More specifically, the relict leopard frog.

Thanks for taking me out here, Corey.

There it is.

(Corey Lange) Yeah, here's the pond.

-What's the water source for this pond?

-So we've got several water sources in this spring complex.

There are several seeps right along the bank of this pond that's feeding this pond immediately here, and then there's several other seeps up above feeding a little meadow.

And then we also have a larger spring coming out from an adit, which has a fairly long spring run.

So there's a lot of water sources up here.

And so we've been managing these springs for both wildlife and the burros.

-So it's a water source for the burros.

Is it a water source for any other wildlife?

-Yeah.

So we've introduced a safe harbor population of relict leopard frogs into the spring complex.

But besides the relict leopard frogs, there's all kinds of native species that live out here.

There's all kinds of dragonflies and other aquatic invertebrates.

There's two species of spring snail that are relatively uncommon, found here in these springs.

Plus this is a really good water source for all kinds of other native wildlife, like the bird species, we saw some Scott's orioles earlier.

I've got game camera photos of chukar.

I've even got game camera photos of mountain lions coming to drink water.

-Hopefully there's no mountain lions today.

-Yeah, hopefully not.

-So you said safe harbor population.

What does that mean?

-So the natural range of the relict leopard frog was primarily in springs and seeps around the Virgin and Colorado River, around the Lake Mead area.

Those springs and seeps, a lot of those have been modified by humans over the years.

And so a lot of those springs the frog used to live in, they've been extirpated from.

So they now only naturally occur in only maybe a dozen springs.

And so in order to conserve this species, us, the BLM, Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, we all worked to conserve this species, and we're trying to identify some additional springs outside of the species' native range that could potentially have this species survive and successfully reproduce.

And this is one of the popular-- this is one of the spring complexes that we settled on that had enough water and was close enough to the native species range that the environmental conditions would be somewhat favorable for it.

-Are there any in this pond here?

-Yeah.

So actually, we're seeing several tadpoles here.

So there's a small little tadpole right here.

-Oh, yeah.

-You see that one?

-Yeah.

It looks like it could have just been a branch.

It blends in really well.

-The tadpoles blend in pretty well.

There is a nice brownish-greenish color.

And then there's several other larger tadpoles out here as well.

-That one over there looks like it's starting to sprout limbs.

-Oh, yeah, it does actually.

Yeah, when they first start to grow, the hind limbs are first.

And then once the hind limbs are fairly far along, then they'll start to grow the front legs.

-Is there any other springs I could check out?

Or even I'd love to see a fully grown frog.

-Yeah.

We've got a few surveys to do, and I've got a lot more water sources to show you.

-Let's go check it out.

-All right, let's do it.

-You would never guess there would be a frog habitat in this location.

Being here and seeing the work that's happening is just so interesting.

This area has multiple springs which have been diverted and dammed to create several habitats to support the relict leopard frog and the other local inhabitants.

Corey toured me through each of the ponds.

He walked me through the different structures of each one.

-Anywhere else we should see?

-Yeah, let's head over to the outlet here, and we can probably find some adult frogs.

-I would love to see an adult.

Let's do it.

We made our way to another water source and manipulated spring.

Multiple small dams create small habitats.

These habitats are sectioned off from the larger ponds.

This keeps the habitat more frog friendly.

Think of it like a private, all-inclusive relict leopard frog resort.

It was now time for the actual survey, and this was all about counting the number of relict leopard frogs.

There's one right here on the rock.

I see one right there between the two rocks.

It just swam away.

-And I see another on the back side of this pond here.

One just moved here.

-Counting these frogs is not easy.

First off, they all look the same.

Second, they move super fast.

Then add in trying not to fall in the water... not such an easy task.

The survey goal was to hopefully count 50.

It was on.

-A lot of times it'll be kind of half in, half out.

I see one on the back side there.

-Oh, yeah.

-He's sitting in shallow water, looking right at us.

Okay, so we got a count here.

Let's move up to the next pool, where it's an even bigger pool, and I bet we'll see even more frogs up there.

Okay.

So I see one, two, three.

So that was four.

-There's a couple back there.

Did you get them?

-Oh, okay, five, six, seven.

I'll stay over here if you want to walk around this way.

-There's a bunch coming.

Keep your eyes open.

I gotta be careful not to fall in here.

There's a whole bunch right here.

Oh, there they went.

-Whoa!

Did you see that?

-They all went at the same time.

-That was six.

-That was a bunch, and there's still more down there.

-I think that was eight frogs that jumped in.

We crushed our goal of 50.

Corey wanted to show me one of the frogs up close, so we netted one, and then we wet our hands with the spring water.

By doing this, it keeps the frogs safe from oils and foreign substances on our hands.

-So frogs, their skin is so porous.

They can absorb any chemicals or anything you have in your hands.

So when you're holding frogs, you just want to be careful that you don't have any sunscreen or any other-- -You hold it.

I don't want to pinch it.

-You're good.

-It's a bit of a green color to him.

-Yes.

There's quite a bit of variation in colors for this species.

But they can be like this greenish color--they can be even greener than this--to more of like a brown or even a golden color.

-Their skin is so slimy.

-Yeah, it's very slimy.

And then they've got this nice lateral line going down the sides.

And then, typically, if you hold them, look at their belly, they have a nice yellowish color on their hind legs.

-Trying to go home.

-And then this species has a pretty much all white belly and throat.

But some species of leopard frogs are more spotted on the belly.

And then this is, this is a maybe like, a year or two old.

They get even bigger, like double the size of this one.

This isn't even the biggest one.

-We continue the survey, moving from habitat to habitat.

-Forty in here three weeks ago.

-Forty in this particular one?

-This pool.

I know they're in here.

They're just hiding.

-What if I try to catch one?

-Let's do that.

-I'm gonna watch that big one so I-- -You want to catch that one?

-I'll try to aim for the big one.

-Okay.

Let's do it.

-This is so cool.

If you just look and you don't look closely, you wouldn't see the frogs.

But when you start actually looking for them, they are everywhere.

-Try to get in front of where you think he's gonna hop.

Or, well, yeah, he might try and go down.

So you could probably put the net behind him, too.

-Did I get him?

-No, no dice.

-I'm gonna blame the cattail.

The cattail got in my way.

Did I get him?

-I don't think so.

-O for 2.

I have one more strikeout.

-Get closer.

You're being timid.

-I don't want to hurt them.

I'm gonna go for this one right here.

-Okay.

Oh, you had it.

-Oh, I lost it?

-He's right here.

Grab him again.

There you go.

I think you might have him.

Nope.

-I'm going lightning fast for this one.

-All right.

-He's not going to outspeed me.

No dice.

Okay, so this is not easy, not easy at all.

And of course, now I think I scared them all away.

But I'm determined; I'm catching a frog.

-There you go.

Okay, there's one at the bottom.

Did you see that one move?

-I don't have eyes one it.

-He's sitting at the bottom.

So you take the net and you scoop right there.

He's right underneath the tip of that.

So you just take-- I think you might have got one.

There you go!

-Yea!

I got one!

I got half the bottom of the pool, too, but I got it.

I need to wet my hand?

Do you want to grab him?

-Sure, yeah.

-Wet your hands.

I'll wet my hands, too.

-Oh, my God!

Oh, I got it.

I got him.

-You got him?

-Yeah.

-I was going to say, all that work.

-So slippery.

Oh, my God!

-Oh, no!

Oh, he's under my foot.

He's under my foot.

He's right there.

-Geez, he's slippery.

All right.

-He doesn't want to get caught.

-I got him.

About lost that one.

He is so slippery right now.

Okay, I'm gonna stick him in your hand.

-I don't want to hold him.

-You don't want to?

-No.

You-- if you're 0 for 3, there's not a chance I'm holding him.

-All right, there we go.

-There he is.

-Oh, my God!

-He does not want anything to do with this.

-He doesn't want it, no.

Well, you caught one.

Great job.

-We got it.

That was really cool.

-Yeah, that was funny.

-That was really cool.

Fifty-four frogs.

I caught one.

What an amazing experience.

-Solid day?

-Amazing day.

Thank you for showing me this.

-Yeah, totally.

It is a pretty cool ecosystem.

It's not often you get to see frogs in the desert.

-No, not at all.

-Yeah.

-At one point during the leopard frog survey, Corey mentioned another survey, one I'm not so thrilled about.

This seemed like an interesting and slightly terrifying opportunity... scorpions.

Now, I'm not saying that this survey will change my opinion on scorpions, but I'm definitely curious to learn more about the species.

All right, here we go.

Deep breath.

All right, Corey, what are we doing here?

-So we're out here in an undisclosed location looking for a potentially new species of scorpion that I discovered a few years ago.

-New.

So this is a scorpion that it's not registered, it's not logged-- -Nope.

- --you found it?

-It has no name to it at all so far.

So this is going to be one that I came out here and discovered a few years ago, because in our district in Southern Nevada, we have a bunch of really rare and endemic species that are isolated on a lot of random sand dunes and other micro habitats like that.

And this area that we're in right now is a large sand dune in this valley that had never been surveyed for scorpions before.

And so a few years ago I came out here trying to see what I could find.

Ended up finding this really interesting scorpion with really big fat hands that doesn't match anything that's currently described.

So I think it's something new.

-Take me back to when you discovered this.

The first night you're out here doing a survey.

First off, how do you do the survey?

-So you go out with a UV flashlight, I've got some in my backpack we'll whip out here in a second, and you're just walking around randomly looking for these scorpions which glow under UV light because they have a special protein in their exoskeleton that reflects back that UV light, and it looks like a glowing blue thing out in the desert.

It shines like a beacon.

All scorpions shine like that.

-So what is the goal tonight, what we're doing today?

-Tonight we're gonna go out, see if we can find some scorpions, and hopefully add a little bit of information on a little bit of a range expansion and checking out a few new spots that I haven't specifically found the scorpion yet, but I assume that they occur.

-So we have the flashlights.

We walk around.

What color do they glow?

-They're gonna glow like a really, kind of like light neon blue, almost the color of our shirts, but a little bit brighter.

-Wasn't even planned.

We ended up being ready.

We're gonna match.

Okay.

And we're gonna find them, and then I'm just gonna holler and say, Hey, Corey, we got a scorpion.

-Yell.

I'll come over.

We'll take a look and determine what species it is and see what information we can glean.

-And I'm hands off, right?

I'm not gonna be-- -I mean, I'll be picking some up, and hopefully I can convince you to do so as well.

They're a lot more gentle than you'd think they would be.

And it's a freaky idea to wrap your mind around.

-"Scorpions" and "gentle."

I don't normally put the two together.

-But we'll see if we can get you to pick one up.

-No promises.

-Yeah.

All right.

-Let's go have some fun.

-All right, let's do it.

-With that, we headed out.

To do this right, the little bit of light that we did have needed to be turned off.

It was strictly UV lights till we found some scorpions.

And that didn't take very long.

-There it is.

You see it?

-Yeah.

-All right.

So here-- -Whoa!

There it is.

-That's a juvenile.

-So that's a baby?

-That's a baby.

-They do glow very bright.

-Don't they glow pretty cool?

-Is this the new species?

-Yeah, that is the new species.

So you guys are probably the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth person to see the species alive.

-We kept moving along the sand dunes.

Corey wanted to get his eyes on as many scorpions as he could.

It was one step in front of the other in the pitch black of the night.

There were quite a few juveniles, which is a good sign for the population.

-Still the same species.

Oh, here's a bigger one.

-Oh, yeah, I see it.

Oh!

-Oh, I think it got away.

-As our search continued, we found a ton of scorpions.

I couldn't believe how many of these scorpions we found.

Some were super relaxed.

Others, not so much.

It was amazing.

Then my curiosity got the best of me.

So if I touch it-- -Yeah, uh-huh.

- --and it pinches me, it's not gonna hurt?

-You might lose the tip of your finger or something, but it won't be-- -Oh, just the tip.

-No, it may pinch you a little bit, but it's not gonna be strong enough to cause any damage.

-I'm trusting you.

-Dude, you've taken nastier falls, I'm sure, than whatever this can damage you.

-Is there a certain area I should touch?

-You know, you want to touch just like, the carapace here, the back, or-- -The bottom?

-The bottom, that works too.

-He's hard.

It's a lot harder than I expected.

-Like a fairly hard exoskeleton.

So they're not really, like, super squishy or anything like that.

-No, they're hard.

They're solid.

-Uh-huh.

What do their legs feel like?

-They're kind of just like little spindly, like hard little legs.

-You almost don't really feel the legs.

-Yeah, they're really tiny, really skinny legs.

-Yeah.

The body is much harder than I expected.

-Yeah.

-Every cell in my body, like, told me, Don't touch this animal.

-I don't like it when they curl.

They curl around like this sometimes.

There we go.

That's better.

-He's pinching.

-He's pinching, but it doesn't hurt.

Like a crab, crabs have like, serious strength.

They can cause a lot-- they can sever a finger, like some species can if they really wanted to.

These guys do not have the muscle mass that crabs do and cannot cause, like hardly any damage, at least the species can't.

There might be some other species of scorpion that have really, you know, strong claws, but not this one.

-He's busy.

He's rock hard in the back.

That's crazy -Uh-huh.

-Interesting.

-And so he's kind of gritty a little bit.

So you can see like, he's not super shiny.

I hope we can find a female and show you just how shiny the females can be.

They call it "glossy."

The females are super glossy.

-They're beautiful.

-Yeah, very, yeah.

Very cool.

-And as luck would have it, we found a female.

-All right, so what I got right here is I found an adult of that undescribed paruroctonus that we've been finding all night.

And she's an adult female.

And the way you tell that she's a female is that she's gonna have a little bit--I mentioned this earlier--but she's gonna have a little bit of more of a glossy look to her and like, more shiny than the males were.

So especially around the head here.

You see how it's a little bit shiny and glossy; whereas, the males had a lot more grittier of a look, like sandpaper.

If you get that under a microscope, it's just like a bunch of like little microscopic bumps that the males would have that the females don't.

-Is there any function to that, or is it just-- -No.

No one really knows.

As far as I know, no one really knows why the males are not as glossy versus the females.

It doesn't-- there's just no research has been done on these guys.

-I did have one last question for Corey.

He found and discovered the species, so that means he gets to name it.

So what's it gonna be?

-So we're very close to having this one named.

I'm hoping by the end of the year or early 2025 we'll have this one named, but we're close.

But it just takes a while.

-Have you considered naming it the Connor scorpion?

-I'll keep that in mind.

The next Scorpion I find, I'll name after you.

How about that?

-Hanging out with Corey never disappoints.

The amount of knowledge he has is so impressive, and I love how willing he is to share that knowledge with us.

I hope you've enjoyed these surveys as much as I have.

I learned a couple things.

I am cool with the frogs, but definitely not so much with the scorpions.

No surprise.

Till next time, I'm Connor Fields, and this is Outdoor Nevada.

♪♪♪