Garden visitors

It's time for new wood chips in my garden paths. The old chips are soil? Compost? What ever it is I want to use it.  I don't want the weeds, so I'm using the tub and top I made from hardwire to keep chicks in for a few weeks.  I turned the lid upside down and poured the soil in.  It sorts out most of the weeds, and larger wood chips.  Today I went to weed the paths and started to dump the soil into the garden bed and noticed a visitor.  I leaned the bin on the side, but instead of running out it ran the other way.  So I decided to take a picture.

Cute! Some sort of lizard?  I guess as a predator these would be welcome to eat bugs and caterpillars right?

I love it when I have visitors :) I had one yesterday, too...looking for some big fat earthworms to come out after the rain.

I think it's a western fence lizard. It eats flys, spiders, bugs like Beatles,  mosquitoes and grasshoppers. We have tons of these little critters.  You can often hear me let out a girly scream because one startles me.  They blend well and run fast, so seems to pop out of nowhere.  When my kids were young they like to catch the poor things.  I don't like reptiles, but they don't like me, so we coexist quite nicely. I'm happy to have anything that eats mosquitoes.
Erin very cool. Is it a lizard? Does the color indicate it's poisonous? Thanks for sharing.    

Hey Jen...it's a northern red salamander. Supposedly common around swampy boggy areas like mine, but this is the first I've ever encountered one. I picked him up to show my kids, and he wasn't in a hurry to leave my hand--I think he liked the warmth. I set him down where I found him, went out a few hours later, and he was gone. I always like coming across reptiles or amphibians in the garden...it switches it up from loads of different insects :) I used to see that lizard in your photo a lot when I was in CA--they liked to bake in the sun and could move like a flash of lightning. I once saw one snag a bee that was perusing rosemary flowers...

Living a busy life in a hot climate I often end up watering in the dark.  I came out to move the water, and found this little toad hanging out on a cantaloupe. I showed my daughter's, because they love toads. This one has now been named Cantaloupe.