Sifting for Sand Skinks

The kind of skinks I'm looking for are unlike any I'd seen before. I was familiar with the 12-lined skinks of rotten logs and the larger brown ones whose names I forgot. These don't leave tracks in the sand. They leave tracks under the sand. How can that be, you may wonder? It's because they see the sand particles from the bottoms. It's because they are looking for termites and other subterranean morsels. Biologists call them fossorial creatures. They aren't the only ones out there (or more properly under there). One cold day I was starting to remove some shingles and there was an inert crowned snake. I put the shingles back since they would provide insulation from the cold. The snaked needed insulation at the moment more than I needed a clean forest floor. Crown snakes live underground, too. You never know what kinds of snakes you'll dig up. Once, when I was removing some debris, my earthwork exposed an extremely pugnacious garter snake. He wanted to bite me, I suppose. I later saw the snake or one of its fellows biting into a toad, which was probably more satisfying to the snake than my pant leg, though the toad didn't seem to be enjoying it. I was digging out cogon grass in a sand pile and a corn snake slithered out. I don't think I had ever seen one in the wild.
Back to sand skinks. I wasn't trying to capture them, just figure out where they were. The squiggles in the sand only show up when you have bare sand, which is in short supply. I had to create my own supply by clearing the ground along some paths through the landscape. After I'd cleared the ground, I put down 2 X 2 pieces of plywood and checked back periodically to see if there were any visits.

I learned that I had set up homes for a lot of creatures. I found traces of sand skinks. I even encountered a couple of them, including my first young one about half adult size. That was neat. There were a lot of racerunners, a terrestrial lizard. I wonder if they eat sand skinks. I don't know.

I encountered one black racer, my most common snake in this preserve or at least the common snake seen, and assorted spiders, ants and other invertebrates. I was especially pleased to encounter my first male sand cockroach. They are dark-winged on this portion of the island chain.

I GPS the board locations and a friend enters the data onto a map. I did one part of the island last year. I do the other part next year. The best time to look for sand skinks is the spring, by the way. They are cryptic creatures and there's more to learn, I just haven't figured out what I want to know yet.

Ridgeboy