Home from Hawai’i. I saw lots of fabulous plants and waterfalls, but the most memorable animal was the gold dust day gecko, Phelsuma laticauda. This, I now realize, is the gecko anthropormorphized as the mascot for GEICO insurance (though for some reason they disregarded the bright blue eye ring when they made that CGI critter).
There’s been a desert tortoise on the loose in our neighbourhood for a little while, and today it graced our yard with a visit. It’s clearly a (former?) pet, as it approached me and let me scratch its head. I fed it a baby cucumber and it trundled off.
A dying tree supports so much life—insects, lichen, fungi, bacteria, reptiles, plants, small mammals. I sat by this log and recorded a few of the organisms I could easily see.
An alligator lizard’s tail can be twice as long as its body. This one’s, sadly, was not.
First I noticed all the bird poop on the ground. So I looked up … and this is what I saw.
It’s always fun to spend an hour drawing with Danny, JJ, and the DWM gang. This week we drew alligators; I chose graphite and watercolour as my media.
We failed to find newts, but we did come across a tiny rattlesnake coiled in the grass.
It was a snakey day in the Park today! Greg Nemes kicked off the Junior Ranger program with a session on snakes. We didn’t see any live specimens that hour, but he found a toad to show the kids.
A short time later, Ranger Allison was removing a rattler from the bridge over Stokes Creek, and throughout the afternoon at the VC, lots of visitors came in to report rattlesnake sightings. (Also seen that day: a bobcat and a mountain lion!)
We last saw a black-headed snake in our yard 14 months ago. Wouldn’t it be cool if it was the same snake? My herpetologist friend Greg says, judging by the size of this one, it’s likely four or five years old … so it’s possible.
