Good Morning, Sunshine!

So far there has been little more than mosquitos in the new in-ground pool in the front garden. (Well, there’s some other practically microscopic invertebrate something buzzing around in there too, and the male Indigo Bunting was eyeing it up the other day.)

While sitting on the bench on my front deck (which over looks the pond) the other morning I realized there was a bit more wave action in it than usual…

(No, don't focus on the plants, Camera! The turtle, the turtle...!)

Not quite what I was expecting to show up. I should have realized, though, given the number of comments I’ve heard about how much box turtles love going (intentionally) for a swim. Small pond, perhaps 15 or 20 gallons? Big box turtle.

I fished him out just in case he wasn’t big enough to get over the low lip. (Must ponder the best way to build an escape ramp…) He was the least fearful box turtle I’ve handled in some time; I earned a few short hisses before he seemed to think better of it. Normally, a box turtle realizes it has a pretty effective defense mechanism: “I have a hinged plastron and I know how to use it!” *thwunk* I had to plop him in a bucket when I went to get a different lens because I didn’t trust him not to scamper off faster than I could get back outside. (I’ve been keeping a haphazard photo account of box turtles I find in the yard; basically, I take their pic and there it will sit in the memory card and the computer until I get around to doing something a bit more scientific with it.)

As an apology and restitution in case he had spent longer in the drink than he had intended, I fetched out some lovely earthworms from a few inadvertent stashes I have. (Given a year or two the mulberry and grape leaves compost beautifully all on their own just lying around in a pile on my patio. Guaranteed to be full of earthworms.)

Because he wasn’t really afraid of me, it took him about two eye blinks (his) before he realized I had dropped breakfast in front of him.

*nom nom nom* And then the bugs (biting flies have been added to the list of the other blood suckers out and about, oh joy) got the better of me (although I didn’t come off the front walk with nearly so many ticks as I expected to) and I let him go on his way…

It was fun tracking his slow, meandering progress across the front yard by the swaying-out-of-time-and-direction-with-the-wind grass and vinca vines.

What's so weird about it?

Doesn’t everyone put out a water dish for their yard lizards? Well, why not? It works. (Okay, I suppose you do have to have a healthy population of Five-lined Skinks in your yard for it to work as well as this...)

(It would have been wonderful if these first photos were in focus but I was lucky to get them, the skink was moving so quickly. She came across the deck straight to the dish, climbed up, took a drink, and skittered back across the deck. I topped off the water as soon as she disappeared.)

Three days later I was a bit more prepared for skinks to be using this dish and I wasn’t disappointed. At least three stopped by within an hour or so: Adult male (red-orange face), the female (still with hints of juvenile color) and a young one (small with bright colors).

Alas, I didn't get the photo of the juvenile skink sitting on my slipper. Two had a tussle and skittered around without paying much attention to me, and one ended up on my slipper (my foot was not in it): the camera was too close to the slipper and when I moved the skink rethought its position and moved as well.

Lizard Rocks.

Or should that be “Lizards rock!"?

The Five-lined Skinks like my yard as much if not more than the gray treefrogs do. The sleek little reptiles are usually found running back and forth across the decks (much to the joy and interest of the indoor cats), and can occasionally be spotted climbing up and down the tulip tree or the silver maple in the side and front yards.

So far this year their favorite activity is spending the morning chilling—er, rather sunning—on a few landscape rocks (from an old water feature that I pulled up many years ago; that's a new one going in) that are on top of a cinder block foundation (for a garage that was never built) in my front yard.

So far there have been three on the wall (adult male, younger adult/female, and a youngster if not two) and at least one has been hanging out in a pile of rocks on the front walkway—I discovered that when I went to clear the pile off the walkway and nearly mushed the skink I didn’t know was between the layers of rock. *sigh*

I will certainly make sure I don’t clear away all of the rocks; if I do move them I’ll build the lizards a pile exclusively for their use. There’s another bunch of rocks already well-sunk into the “garden” that I might as well just leave as it is for the skinks—I’m sure they’re already in there anyway.

Add “skink” to one of the things that has come in under my ill-fitting front storm door. !@#$% At least that’s how I’m assuming the cats managed to grab one; I found a yearling, tailless, very dead and quite flat, in the cat room this week. *sniff* (Yes, I know--fix the door, Wren!) Up until now we had been even—I rescued one out of a spider web one summer but found another dried up in a potting soil container the following spring…

I watered down the hatchling (tiny-tiny-tiny with a brilliant blue tail—that will fade as the skink ages) while pondering how best to extract it. Funny how you don’t appreciate how incredibly strong spider silk is until you try to untangle a lizard from the sticky stuff.

The skink seemed to have spun a bit and was still quite feisty, too much so for me to attempt to unwrap all of the spider web that had entangled its legs, so I put it in a container with some rough substrate and hoped for the best—that it would know how to rub itself free. Much to my relief, it did! And here it is, ready to be released:

The spiders have a right to hunt the deck same as the skinks but yes, I pulled down that particular web. (Wee tiny little lizards are nevertheless waaaay too big for the weavers anyway; there wasn’t a spider in sight through the entire ordeal.) Would still love to know how the lizard got into it the web the first place—it was strung across a wide open area of the deck and the skink would have had to fall or jump a foot or so to land where it did…

Snake in the (sort of) Grass.

Technically, it was in the irises... I was sitting on my deck last week, braving the bugs and heat, when the iris leaves next to the front walk started waving in the dead-calm air. So I watched intently to see what would meander out of the garden and was rewarded with great views of this little neighbor of mine. This is only my second sighting of Rough Green Snake in the fifteen years I've had the property. And it was in nearly the same location; the first one I found was coming up the steps I was sitting on to take some of these photos.

Find the snake! (Click photo to bigify.)

Hint: it isn't in focus.

This species is relatively small, only a couple of feet long

and maybe as fat around as a "safety" crayon at the widest point...

Snake in goldenrod.

Vivid demonstration of why some butterfly caterpillars

(especially swallowtails) mimic snake eyes...

Sunbathers of a different sort...

Five-lined skins, an adult male (pale, indistinct body markings but bright orangey-red head) and probably a young adult female (large but still with visible "lines" and blue color to her tail--she'll fade and go more gray as she ages [gee, that sounds familiar]), and a Red Admiral (butterfly) enjoying the sun hitting my silver maple in the late afternoon of May 4th, 2012, the Day of a Million Butterflies.

At least three southern species--the admirals, Question Marks, and American Ladies--migrated north in huge numbers (easily 100-200 passing per minute, for hours) this year. I was quite happy to find the lizards; they gave me a different photographic take on what I knew would be dozens of butterfly photos from the "Event".

What are you doing way up there, girlfriend?

Not typically an arboreal species, but the books say that skinks will climb trees. Obviously. Although I've never encountered one quite this high off the ground (8-10ft, well above my head) before.