Just found while doing some gardening. The underbelly is yellow in colour.

A salamander. Very common in those parts. They are totally harmless by the way.

Dinner? (too short)

Agree with Melusine. Black and yellow definitely sounds like a salamander. Lucky you, I haven't seen one in ages!

Lucky you Phil! A beautiful name for a beautiful creature.

Alpine salamander. There's also the more fancy coloured fire salamander. Ah, school days when we had to go out, look for a thing and draw it - of course, we are not David Attenborough so creatures didn't magically appear for our art attempts.

Positively a Salamander

I have seen these a couple of times. The first one I saw was near the Alpine Garden at Schynigge Platte. I thought it was something rare. I showed a picture to the staff at the garden and they just shrugged it off as if they were as common as flies

I wondered what these are too we have them in our garden...thanks

"When threatened, they excrete a poisonous liquid from their skin glands", so respect is due as they can easily be injured.

http://amphibiaweb.org/cgi/amphib_qu...e-species=atra

he didn't seem so happy when i picked him up. luckily, i was wearing my gardening gloves, so haven't been poisoned

It's not really poisonous for us, but some persons are allergic to this substance they secrete when threatened. Thus it's best to avoid handling them!

Anyway they are protected if I'm not mistaken, so better let them live their own lives peacefully!

i quite like them. it seems he made a home in the pile of fir tree branches i made in the garden. i was getting rid of them and almost squished him!

Hope you let the pile of branches in your garden then? And if you have enough space, leave a nice pile of dry leaves in a corner, it'll make a wonderful winter nest for a hedgehog

Phil, if you enjoyed Migros promotions a little more, you'd have known the answer. There's a pic of this salamander (along with info about it) in the new Mountainmania sticker book.

Haha - I was going to make a joke about you having discovered the elusive Swiss Alligator, one of the most endangered species in Switzerland. And I was going to include a picture of a Swiss alligator.

But when I googled 'Swiss Alligator', here's what I got. (Could explain why the elusive Swiss Alligator is so...elusive!)

yeah. i left some there for him. i was hoping there would be more so that they can eat all the flying bugs etc. i much prefer to have salamanders and spiders to mosquitos and flies.

There may be more. I found one, then another, then another, and more so we have at least twenty in one corner of our garden.

(However, after some over-enthusiastic gardening in the vicinity, one's now missing a leg )

pic or it doesn't exist

He hasn't got it yet. He's hoping someone will swap it for one of is 20 identical pictures of a rock.

for one? who'd swap a salamander for a rock? perhaps a UBS trader, i guess