Creatures
Stonework can be very accurately described as building habitat. Dry stacked walls make great high rises for creatures of a certain size. Even mortared walls have endless nooks and crannies where bugs, lizards, snakes and others make their homes. Here are a handful of the creatures we have run across on our work- when we’ve had the presence of mind and time to get a camera and take a picture.
We found this gray tree frog under a step stone that hadn’t been mortared into place yet. His arm pits (leg pits?) were bright yellow.
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This is a five-lined skink that I chased around on a stucco wall for twenty minutes trying to get a good picture. He had just taken up residence in a mortared wall finished the day before.
While not as aggressive or venomous as rattlesnakes, copperheads are quietly dangerous because they are so well camouflaged on the forest floor. When threatened, they freeze and their color and markings hide them amongst the dead leaves. People step on them unknowingly and pay the consequence. Dave almost stepped on this handsome specimen, which he described as “shiny as a new penny.”
Copperheads bear live young, a somewhat uncommon trait in reptiles.
Photo by K.J.
A cicada nymph found and replanted in the soil behind a dry stacked retaining wall. Larval cicadas feed on tree roots, which means their diet is primarily water, a key reason they develop so slowly. Depending on the particular species and the environmental conditions, they spend anywhere from 2-17 years underground.
In the middle of a heat wave in the middle of March, we found several eastern fence lizards scrambling amongst the railroad timbers on a steep bank in north Asheville.