Tortoise_Wrangler
Member
This little guy is the Western Fence Lizard aka blue bellied lizard. If you live in Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah or Washington then you probably see these guys all the time. When I first moved into my neighborhood here in SoCal, I rarely saw these guys and didn't think much of it when I didn't see any around my home. Well, it turns out these little guys like to eat fleas and ticks, among many other bugs but apparently their preference is fleas and ticks. I think the reason I didn't find these guys around my house was a pair of mocking birds that lived in the tree in my yard and the neighborhood cat that prowled my property.
Now you're probably wondering where I'm going with this, so I'll get to it. SoCal is being overrun with fleas at the moment, this extremely hot and dry weather is apparently the perfect breeding conditions for fleas. I work property management and my facility was so overrun you couldn't walk around without feeling them jump on you. I called an exterminator and he told me that his calls for fleas has risen by 5 times, so much so he's been working 12-14 hour days just to keep up with the amount of calls for fleas. Well, I brought fleas home with me and my house got pretty bad, but we quelled them by removing the carpet in our home and medicating our dogs. Now the problem was, I started to find fleas on my tortoises soft spots and there wasn't a day where they were flea free.
I looked up remedies but found nothing, but I just so happened to come across an article about Western Fence Lizards and how they eat fleas. Luckily for me the cat that hunted all the lizards died and the mocking birds where killed by my Shiba Inu (A bird hunting dog from Japan) who literally snagged them from the air. When I realized the potential these Lizards had, I went to my parents home. They have two big dogs that keep the cats away and a hawk that keeps the birds away, their home is crawling with Western Fence Lizards. I caught about a dozen of them and released them in my tortoise enclosure. This was last year, but in the Summer I noticed a bunch of baby lizards all over my property, and suddenly I noticed way less fleas. Then I noticed I haven't seen any fleas on my tortoises. My enclosure has so many hiding places for these lizards they're thriving, and now they have a habitat they maintain for my tortoises.
If you see these little lizards, they're your tortoise's best friends and I couldn't be happier with the colony that has formed alongside my tortoise breeding colonies. Just an Eco-friendly tip for my friends here on the tortoiseforum. My neighborhood is also overrun with brown widows from south africa, and invasive species that are wiping out the black widow, I have seen a whole lot less of these guys too. The lizards also eat caterpillars that were infesting my garden, that has been reduced significantly too.
Thanks Western Fence Lizards, you guys are really cool dudes.