Finally a Horned Lizard

On Saturday, I went up to Ford Ord to visit with my cousins, aunt and uncle. The plan was to do some mountain biking with my cousins (Will and Aaron) around the Fort Ord area where I had competed in a biking race earlier this year. As we cruised down one of the trails, Aaron called me back to check out a lizard he had found. Sure enough, it was a Coast Horned Lizard! (A.K.A Horney Toad) I had been searching for these lizards a long time but had nothing to show for it. I even spent a lot of the South West Road Trip looking for them, but still came up empty handed. Then I finally end up seeing one very close to home! There was a video taken but the lizard is small and hard to see unless the video is enlarged, but when enlarged, the quality greatly diminishes. So here is a photo: Feel free to click the photo for a larger view!

A Sad Find

This thursday, my brother and I went climbing in Mt. Diablo State Park. As we drove up a skinny road to the climbs, my brother noticed a snake on the road. We pulled over and ran to see what it was. Unfortunately the snake was dead but very intact and it was a beautiful Gopher Snake (A.K.A. Bull Snake). Lately it seems like for every live snake I find, there are two dead ones, but I guess that is part of herping on roads.

From Climbing to Herps

On 4th of July weekend, my family decided to take a day trip to Pinnacles National Monument so that my brother and I could do some climbing. In order to find the climbs, we had to do quite a bit of hiking and scrambling around this beautiful landscape and this caused us to stumble upon some cool herps.

I was incredibly excited when we found 4 snakes on this trip!!! Unfortunately they were all the same specie and they were just common garter snakes but still some awesome finds.

3 of them were seen swimming in a reservoir near the climbing

This photo actually shows two snakes. One is very young and small near the right side of the photo

Along with the snakes, we discovered many lizards including this whiptail: