Or should that be
“Lizards rock!"?
The Five-lined
Skinks like my yard as much if not more than the gray treefrogs do. The sleek
little reptiles are usually found running back and forth across the decks (much
to the joy and interest of the indoor cats), and can occasionally be spotted
climbing up and down the tulip tree or the silver maple in the side and front
yards.
So far this year their
favorite activity is spending the morning chilling—er, rather sunning—on a few landscape rocks (from
an old water feature that I pulled up many years ago; that's a new one going in) that are on top of a
cinder block foundation (for a garage that was never built) in my front yard.
So far there have been three on the wall (adult male, younger adult/female, and a youngster if not two) and at least one has
been hanging out in a pile of rocks on the front walkway—I discovered that when I went to clear the pile off the walkway and nearly mushed the
skink I didn’t know was between the layers of rock. *sigh*
I will certainly make
sure I don’t clear away all of the
rocks; if I do move them I’ll build the lizards a pile exclusively for their
use. There’s another bunch of rocks already well-sunk into the “garden” that I
might as well just leave as it is for the skinks—I’m sure they’re already in there anyway.
Add “skink” to one
of the things that has come in under my ill-fitting front storm door. !@#$% At
least that’s how I’m assuming the cats managed to grab one; I found a yearling,
tailless, very dead and quite flat, in the cat room this week. *sniff* (Yes, I know--fix the door, Wren!) Up
until now we had been even—I rescued one out of a spider web one summer but
found another dried up in a potting soil container the following spring…
I watered down the
hatchling (tiny-tiny-tiny with a brilliant blue tail—that will fade as the
skink ages) while pondering how best to extract it. Funny how you don’t
appreciate how incredibly strong
spider silk is until you try to untangle a lizard from the sticky stuff.
The skink seemed to
have spun a bit and was still quite feisty, too much so for me to attempt to
unwrap all of the spider web that had entangled its legs, so I put it in a
container with some rough substrate and hoped for the best—that it would know
how to rub itself free. Much to my relief, it did! And here it is, ready to be
released:
The spiders have a
right to hunt the deck same as the skinks but yes, I pulled down that particular
web. (Wee tiny little lizards are nevertheless waaaay too big for the weavers
anyway; there wasn’t a spider in sight through the entire ordeal.) Would still
love to know how the lizard got into it the web the first place—it was strung
across a wide open area of the deck and the skink would have had to fall or
jump a foot or so to land where it did…
