Super excited to find this legless lizard at the Farm!!! Another volunteer had been digging up some weeds near a peach tree and unearthed this guy. It was living in some recently planted loose soil that is mostly loamy and regularly irrigated. The farm is within 500 feet of the Tijuana River.
We have very sandy soil and I found him under a rock. I have seen 3 or 4 in the two years I have lived here but this is the first one that I caught alive.
The family Anniellidae, known as American legless lizards contains two species in a single genus Anniella: A. pulchra, the California legless lizard, with two subspecies A. p. pulchra and A. p. nigra, and the rare A. geronimensis, the Baja California legless lizard.