Horned Lizards: Masters of Defense
With a crown of horns and ability to shoot blood from its eyes, the horned lizard is built for defense. The 16 living species in the genus Read More…
reptiles
Serpent Surprise: A Rattlesnake Encounter
One of our technicians was lightheartedly birdwatching on her day off when she recently stumbled upon this slithery surprise in the Sierra foothills. Bird-watching is one of Read More…
Blue Caboose
It’s hard to miss a lizard with a bright blue tail. This colorful little lizard is called the blue-tailed skink, also known as the western skink (Plestiodon Read More…
See you later, alligator
While checking our Oakdale rotary screw trap on the Stanislaus River, our field crew recently ran into an unexpected visitor in their catch. The California alligator lizard Read More…
More than one way to breathe
Breathing can take a variety of forms, but aquatic turtles have developed some of the more unusual strategies. The Eastern snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina serpentina, is a Read More…
Mistaken identity
Spending as much time in the field as we do monitoring fish, we often encounter a variety of reptiles, insects, birds and mammals. Most of the time Read More…
Coldblooded surprise!
We never know what we are going to catch when we open the livebox on one of our rotary screw traps. This Northern Pacific Rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganus) Read More…