Newborn Western Fence Lizard

This morning not long after we woke up, my wife was giving our backyard plants some extra water in anticipation of yet another scorching day. For the past week or so, it’s been hot out here on the West Coast—really hot.

Upon putting the garden hose back, she noticed this little guy:

I had a look myself and was amazed to see how small this newly-born western fence lizard was.

The photographer in me naturally thought to run inside and grab my camera. This was obviously an opportunity for some macrophotography, and my 55mm f/3.5 Micro-Nikkor was obviously the right choice of lens for the job.

I managed to get about four or six inches from my subject. I don’t think he was quite old enough to know to be scared of me, not that I would have done anything harmful to him.

I knew being that close meant my depth of field would be rather short, so an aperture setting of f/8 felt like the right choice. With camera set to aperture priority mode and with ISO set to auto, the camera picked a shutter speed of 1/60 sec. at ISO 100 in the bright morning sunlight. I wanted a bit faster shutter speed to compensate for handheld shake, so I manually set my ISO to 200 to force the shutter to fire one stop faster. In hindsight, I might have tried going for f/16 to lengthen my depth of field, but I like the portrait effect of having the lizards head in focus with the rest of his body a bit out of focus.

I’m always excited to see a new clutch of western fence lizards appear in the backyard. In the past, we’ve noticed them in September. Seeing them this early in the summer is rather surprising.

That little guy was really small. After breakfast, I went back out with a ruler to measure that woodchip that is immediately to the foreground of him. It measured just under an inch or so. If he had been directly on that woodchip, he would have been able to perch upon it completely and quite comfortably.

To put all of that in context, western fence lizards typically grow to around eight inches from tip of nose to tip of tail.