Among other things, I was out tonight specifically looking for this – I’m just not sure if I found it or not, but I think I did.
Ever since I missed the anole egg hatching (see previous post,) I’ve been checking the environs to see if I can find the newborn – mostly at night, because it’s very likely that the hatchling will stretch out on a leaf someplace to snooze, a habit of theirs. Nothing has ever been visible near the spot where the terrarium was, but about five meters away on a Japanese maple, I found this guy:
This is the smallest I’ve seen and quite skinny-looking, and while five meters is a bit of a trek when you measure a grand total of 40mm in length including the tail (I measured,) it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
This, by the way, is after I misted the little guy carefully and indirectly, because they panic if they think it’s starting to rain, and even the misting caused it to get anxious for a moment. We can also see that, despite being less than a week old (if I’m indeed correct,) it’s already lost the tip of its tail – possibly to an adult male that I found hanging out on the corner right near where the terrarium was. Also, seeing this size and knowing the height of the walls of the terrarium, I’m impressed that it managed to find its way out.
We need a scale shot of course.
And we revisit the egg, for comparison:
Still could be a tight squeeze, but possible, anyway; I have no way of determining that the egg really was from a Carolina anole, and there are a couple of candidate species in the immediate area, but the odds are in favor of it anyway.
As an update, while it’s still a couple of weeks too early to see the newborn of the pregnant anole that I featured, another tiny juvenile has appeared on the jasmine vines around the same lamp post, joining the previous one that made for the dewy portrait. Meanwhile, I’m still monitoring the turtle nests every few hours, so far without luck. We found another turtle egg right in the middle of the yard the other day, intact and with nothing in evidence around it, and while I suspect it had been too long out of a buried nest, it hadn’t dried out either, so I rehomed it in the same terrarium to see if anything develops. At least, I think it’s a turtle egg, but it’s pretty oblong and might be a snake – I shone a powerful flashlight through it and nothing of any shape had developed. If something happens, you know where to find it of course.