Kansas Herp Society meeting

This weekend I attended the Kansas Herpetological Society annual conference in Hays, Kansas.  The social events were held at the Sternberg Museum, an absolute gem of a natural history museum in the middle of Kansas.  On Friday evening, the Joseph T. Collins Library was dedicated and officially opened to us, along with the museum itself and the new Rattlers exhibit.  The latter housed live specimens of 19 of the 22 species of rattlesnakes in the US. It was amazing, thanks to the hard work of curators Curtis Schmidt and Travis Taggert.  The talks were held at Ft. Hays State University, and there were several that were very interesting and well-presented.  Overall it was a great weekend, but the absence of our hero and mentor, Joe Collins, was certainly conspicuous.  We all really, really missed him.