Today I moved a pot of canna's in my garden and found three baby snakes hiding out underneath. At least, I think they are snakes. I know that we have snakes here in CA but I never thought I would see them in my neighbourhood because we are so built up. I wonder what mommy looks like and how big she is.
What you have there wgnkiwi
Is legless lizards.
If you look closely at the picture you will see small legs.
They don`t function Like normal Lizards legs do.
Harmless to humans.
This is closer to home!
I believe that this is actually a species of Slender Salamander. Note the bulging eyes, which are not seen in legless lizards.
I cannot identify the unique species and it may be unknown. Small local environments seem to be common, with a wide variety of Slender Salamanders in CA:
http://www.californiaherps.com/salamanders/salamanders.html
The Black-bellied seems to be a possible match and is in your area:
http://www.californiaherps.com/salamanders/pages/b.nigriventris.html
You might want to show one of these to a local biologist.
Mark
Those are great!
Aw - my son is heartbroken. He's been nagging me to let him get a snake for a pet for about the last 3 years and he was so excited when we showed him what we found.
Still, I think Stelco is right and they are salamanders. How cool! We were very careful to cover them back up after photographing them - hopefully they'll hang out with us for a while and not end up as bird fodder.
The more time I spend in the garden the less fearful I am of the critters. A couple of years ago I would have run screaming at the sight of a spider, now I'm out photographing them and looking them up on the bug files. Having our own garden snake (salamander) would be amazing.
