{Our Garden Critters}

Often I've joked about how many species there might be living on our entire property. I wish they would all come out and line up alongside the road to introduce themselves to us. Would we really like to know?! Our felines once in a while do lift up a tip of the veil by bringing us yet another species we had not seen up close... Last week I had two of our garden critters being revealed to me. One was a skink, I don't exactly know which one it was. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Georgia has only a few species of lizards, six of which are skinks. So I rescued one of those six! They belong to the reptiles.

I had to hold on to this one while making photos with one hand. Their toes are rather scratchy too.

Big eyes, a funny nostril and open ears...

Tiggy-Tiger had obviously wounded it a little, under its belly, as I have a bit of blood in my hand... But after all, I rescued him/her from a cruel death!

One last shot before I set it free, near the creek where it rapidly disappeared under the water plants. The creek is near dry...

This swamp snake I found curled up on the tiles of the staircase area... all by itself! But there are also some black cat hair so maybe our Spicy, Bandido or Barty did bring me this.

Georgia has a rich biodiversity of snakes, with forty-one native species now documented according to the same source; Georgia Encyclopedia. So I did squat down to take this photo of the dead snake for identifying it later.

I picked it up, behind its head and put it out on the retainer wall next to the driveway for Pieter to have a look at its full length. How in the world do those felines hold this in their mouth while pushing through the cat door?

It was a harmless Swamp Snake of some 45 cm. When Pieter did come to look at it, there was no snake on the retainer wall... Aha, lesson learned is that snakes play dead out of self defense and only move on after quite some time. We saw it one more time and then it was gone. Second chance in life I guess.