I was just reading one of my favorite blogs, it cover a wide spectrum of topics gardening included. In today’s post Kathryn has a little ditty concerning a Chameleon. You ought to go over to her blog and poke around a little, she is quite creative. The post reminded my to look at the digital images I took this past weekend with relatively new macro lens that I don’t use as often as I could/should. There is a wonderful world on a small-scale that we walk past every day and never notice. The lizard in the photo is kind of like a chameleon because they appear in two shades, green with blue eye shadow and beige – wood fence color.

My little green garden helper.

I have written about these guys in previous posts and they seem to be visible more often. I may have as many as 5 or 6 patrolling at any time. They are not a chameleon but are called a Green Anole – Anolis carolinensis for you Latin lovers! They do change color – the influences on the color change are temperature, background color and mood….I wonder about this mood thing, how do you tell what the mood of a lizard is at the moment? Who studies this sort of stuff? I do have an answer…..my first wife’s uncle was a professor of herpetology at the University of California, Berkley. Dr. Robert C. Stebbins –

Robert C. Stebbins is Emeritus Professor of Zoology and Emeritus Curator
in Herpetology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California,
Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including

A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians and A Natural History of Amphibians. Dr. Stebbins is both author and illustrator. The reason he may know is that he is extremely close to the subject…..to the degree that the illustrations are accurate down to the exact number of scales on the critter! An anecdote that was passed on to me….I can’t actually verify that it is totally true, it was said that Dr. Stebbins was interested in the details of the copulation activities of certain amphibian that he brought the pair to his home and somehow had a alarm of some sort rigged up so when the event occurred he could hop out of bed and make his scientific observation. Yes, I think he might know.

Another one of the bug eating crew hanging around the back of my compost bin.

A Green Anole? Yes, with altered mood or shivering due to a temperature change.

Check these folks out – Kathryn

kiwsparks.wordpress.com

For good macro garden and nature photos and blogging see Bonnie at –

theirisandthelily.wordpress.com/about

Bishop