Skink ? Leaping lizards!

Just when I thought I really knew this place well, a novel new thing appears.  I opened the door to walk outside and I stopped in my tracks. In a beam of light hitting the porch floor I saw a small black creature. My first reaction was to say to myself "Oh, a salamander! How neat!"  It then occurred to me that a salamander would not be on the porch, it would be under a rock or log.  That immediately made me reconsider what I could be looking at. I then thought, "Oh, maybe a skink?".....so I run to the computer and look up skinks, and if there are any in our state, Maryland. I was surprised to find out that there are four or five types of skinks in Maryland. How neat! ....lizards in my yard! How could I have missed these for the last four years!

striped blue tailed skink on Maryland porch

I ran for my camera, and took this picture.  It was quite small, maybe 4-5 inches.  Its color was beautiful. The body was a dark slick and shiny black with yellow-green stripes the length of the body, and blue color along the top of the tail line. Just beautiful coloring. It is called a Blue tailed skink.  After I captured this photo, the crazy blonde dog took a glance at the skink and wanted to pounce, yet in the meantime the skink saw me and made its departure to the dcpths of darkness under the porch. All in all an enjoyable little encounter. I hope that skink is getting fat eating the thousands of spiders that have showed up here at the farm this summer.

As I always say, this is a garden of wonder, you just never know what is going to show up here. Last week we had a very large fox in the headlights when we returned home late in the evening, and a opossum in the headlights in the same place the next evening. I knew both were coming into the yard because of the footprints I found in the snow over the winter, but this was the first time we saw each of them in the flesh. Always an amazing place for wildlife, here at Shore Side Farm House.