6- Return to work in Karas region

After charging batteries in Etosha, I was ready to go back and look for more reptiles.

It's not that I didn't love looking for animals in the south, but there is something that happens in this area, and that is that although the diversity of species is quite big, the abundance is very scarce, and you can go for days without seeing anything new or directly without seeing a single reptile. Which is very psychologically draining. Hours and hours spent with a fairly strict methodology to find nothing...

But when I came back, I had luck on my side. I had a very good week, one of those that made me want to play the lottery just in case.

In 4 days I found 3 different species that I hadn't seen yet, some of which left me amazed. Oh, and I saw a horned viper again, that poisonous beauty.

One of those species was Cordylosaurus subtesellatus, a beautiful blue-tailed lizard, which hides in cracks or under rocks. But it's an extremely fast animal, so I couldn't photograph it. But here is a photograph of the little animal.

It was curious that one of the specimens that we saw, was seen by my colleague Germán attacking a gecko in the middle of the day, like a real bully, with a racist attitude not very typical of cold-blooded squamous, because it is not that he was preying on it, but that he is an insectivore. The observer of that scene loved it, and I on the one hand was jealous of not having seen it, but on the other hand I don't like to see xenophobic aggressions of that kind.

Picture shared by Francois Theart

Another was Namibiana occidentalis, an animal that without the attentive expert eye can easily be mistaken for a strange worm. Despite its very unthreatening appearance and its myrmecophagous diet, it is a really interesting ophidian, partly because of its strange appearance and its fossorial life, which makes it difficult to see.

It belongs to the family Typhlopidae, and I tell you this because several species of the family are able to reproduce by parthenogenesis, without the need for two individuals of the opposite sex to have offspring. This, together with the fact that they live underground, has made them become invasive species in several points of the globe, when they are transported in pots of ornamental plants exported abroad. And with their reproductive potential, a single individual can generate hundreds.

Their eyes surprised me, and in part I found them funny, since having that fossorial life they are very underdeveloped, to the point of being vestigial eyes (ocelli), capable only of detecting light. And although I had already read about them in the literature, I was surprised to see them in person.

There was one species that we had heard for many sunsets and nights since our arrival, but despite our efforts, we had never been able to see or capture them. These were the Ptenopus garrulus maculatus, the barking geckos, a species that builds quite deep burrows (up to one meter deep).

When temperatures are not too low, the males come out of their burrows to call the females by "barking".

However, they are very small and move quickly on the sand, so it is very difficult to see them before they run away. They do not have long fingers adapted to this like other species, but they do have special scales on their fingers.

And how did we see them? Well, it was after a day of strong wind when there was a sandstorm, and we knew that it was a very good opportunity since the rain and the wind make their burrows partially or totally covered and there is a greater probability of seeing them wandering around in the sand. And so it was, that's how we saw this curious reptile.

Males have that yellow patch in the throat that can be seen on the pictures.

And I've saved for last what for me was one of the best finds on Namibian territory. Pachydactylus rugosus. A unique gecko, the one I most wanted to see. The specimen I found had a regenerated tail due to some previous altercation from which it came out badly. The tail is one of its most remarkable and beautiful features, but even without it in its maximum splendor, its face and body are not left behind. As a picture is worth a thousand words, I will not add any more, and here I leave it to you.

And of course I don't forget the horned viper, which was comfortably buried in the sand and allowed me to take some pictures of it. A beautiful specimen, because the species has a quite wide variability of colors, and this one had some orange colors like the sand in which it was hiding. Simply beautiful.