Bernard Brown is an urban herper. For the longest time, he thought that was an oxymoron.

Herpers are people who like to overturn logs and rocks trying to find snakes, frogs, salamanders and the like to photograph and marvel at.

When the 31-year-old Brown moved to West Philadelphia several years ago, he figured that except for the Fairmount Park system, he'd have to drive an hour or two to get to rural places to track down amphibians and reptiles.

Then, one day, a friend in the neighborhood showed him a northern brown snake her cat had dragged in from her backyard.

A bulb went off inside Brown's head.

Why couldn't there be herps in the backyards and forgotten little corners of the concrete jungle?

Many herps have modest needs — someplace to crawl under for instance. Flagstones, flower pots, tricycles will do. And backyards and lots all have slugs, snails and worms and bugs herbs need to eat.

And urban rowhouse neighborhoods are less likely than suburban homeowners to use pesticides on their lawns.

"They have to runs from birds and cats but besides that it's a pretty good setup for them," Brown reasons.

So he started looking around home.

"You can't go looking in people's backyards but I started looking at maps and areas around my neighborhoods that might be accessible. I first started with vacant lots around Philly," recalls Brown, who gave tips on urban herping last Friday to the Lancaster Herpetological Society.

Many of those vacant lots are in distressed parts of the city and drug dealers sometimes hide their illicit substances there.

Brown even has a line rehearsed: "Really, man, I'm not stealing your stash. I'm just looking for snakes. Really."

He hasn't had to recite it yet, though he once was stopped by police as he flipped over chunks of concrete near a street curb.

And to his unremitting excitement and joy, he does find herps.

Brown snakes, garter snakes and red-backed salamanders mostly. If there's any kind of a stream, he's poking around for northern water snakes, snapping turtles, painted turtles, musk turtles, green frogs and bullfrogs.

"I was thrilled to discover that Cobbs Creek is alive; that it isn't just a rocky storm sewer but an aquatic environment that deserves my herping attention," he wrote recently in his blog, "Philly Herping." You can read it and see oodles of photos of his finds at www.phillyherping.blogspot.com.

Next, Brown turned his attention to cemeteries. He found a bonanza in Woodlands Cemetery, which dates back to the 1700s and has a wooded border.

The John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge near the airport was packed with wildlife. Another mother lode was railroad buffer in the the inauspiciously named West Parkside Industrial Park.

He has turned up all kinds of critters there. But it's also driven home an adage Brown has realized about urban herping: "Unless it's a park, it's fair game and we shouldn't get too attached to any piece of land."

Brown and his wife once found 86 brown snakes curled up hibernating under a tire in the industrial park. The site has since been bulldozed.

Brown has built up such a reliable repository for herps in his neck of Philly that he has started introducing local kids to the wonders right under their feet.

"At the very least, I hope to introduce some kids to green spaces and a different angle on nature. Instead of something boring in a textbook, maybe they get excited over a centipede. And every bird they see fly by or frog hop away is kind of like a little miracle to them."

And Brown points out you can herp 12 months a year.

"People in their minds divide their spaces such as urban space and where I live and where I work. It's fun to erase some of these boundaries sometimes," he muses.

"It really enriches my life to know that even in places where I live and work there can be natural places, too."

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