Males of Lacerta viridis, the European green lizard, are an intense dark green with blue jowls.
Memories sure help keep us going. Initially I was going to blog about the first red Carolina pygmy rattler I had ever seen way back about 1956 or 58. Then I said no. Let’s talk about black rat snakes in the derelict houses along Rte 1 up in VA. Or maybe rainbow snakes along Rte 17 in SC. But then I happened across a photo of a western green lizard in Topeka, KS and got to thinking about Quivira Specialties Company.

Quivira Specialties was a mail order live creature and curio supplier. One of the first, it was owned by Charles E. and Mae D. Burt. I learned about the company after reading their ad in the magazine “Outdoor Life”. I was probably in one of the junior high (now middle school) grades at the time so that make the time period in the 1950s.

Mediterranean gecko. Note the transverse barring on the tail.
I’m not keeping as close of a watch on herpetological happenings as I once did, so when Jake mentioned to me “there’s a new house gecko in eastern Louisiana” I was more than a little surprised.

But when I indulged in a little research I found that this gecko, the small-spotted house gecko, Hemidactylus parvimaculatus, had been first reported from the viicinity of the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, about 5 years earlier in 2013. So I guess it can’t really be considered new, just newish. Just as a “by-the-way” this gecko is native to Sri Lanka, Reunion, Mauritius and Rodrigues, Comoro Islands, Maldives, Mascarene Islands, and India (Kerala). It has now been introduced in areas as diverse as Australia’s Cocos Islands and Louisiana (Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Tammany parishes).