While I was hauling planter mix to fill the new raised garden beds, I happened to notice these two lizards near the house. Lizards are not at all uncommon. However, these both were larger than average, one was highly colored, and they were not ignoring each other taking in the sun.
Instead of the usual lizard behavior that looks like they are doing push-ups while soaking in the solar energy, these two seemed to be battling.
I could not capture the activity well enough with still shots. It appeared that they would grab one another and sometimes roll around or bounce up in the air a foot before they separated for another round.
Eventually I had to go back to work, so I did not find out how the confrontation ended.
Maybe not little boxes, but definitely on the hillside, the raised bed area for our vegetable garden has been more than tripled. Our next door neighbor Charlie and his son were a huge help in getting the boxes from the driveway to their designated spots. They are built from a composite material instead of plain lumber and thus should be a perfect solution for the garden. However, they also seem to weigh a lot.
Actually, it was snake in the weeds today. The mail had just been delivered so I was on my way to get it from the mailbox when I saw a snake just off the driveway in the weeds. This is by no means the first time we have found a snake in that particular area. But it was the first time for finding a snake featuring the rattles at the tip of its tail. My spouse kept watch on it while I went in for the camera. The rattler seemed in no hurry and allowed me to take pictures from several places. I guess it figured we were no threat and was happy to soak up the sun.
Even more unusual was the fact that while I was getting the camera, my husband noticed a second snake just a few feet away. But that one was a gopher snake, the kind we have encountered frequently. The sunlight caught its scales just right — it almost sparkled. It moved off and when I checked again some minutes later, it was doing what a good gopher snake should do — heading down a gopher hole.
Last week as we went to put the trash and recycle out by the street, my husband found a small snake outside the front steps. It was pencil thin and perhaps 15 inches long. The sun was already past the hill, so in the poor light it looked mostly like a plain gray color with not much in the way of markings. Of course, we had to get a camera to take photos of this visitor, since we did not recognize him. Apparently that was a bit threatening from the snake’s perspective and he responded by coiling his tail into a cone and pointing the underside at us. That was how we found out that the bottom of the snake was a dark orange red color and finally noticed that there was a band of the same color around his body behind his head. So we were then able to identify this one as Diadophis punctatus, the ring necked snake.