Lizard!

by Charlie Peverett in At home on 21.05.08

It’s not every morning you find a lizard at the bottom of your stairs.

But today our cat, which normally keeps us mercifully out of the loop when it comes to his night-time predations, decided to bring his spoils indoors. Presumably he realised he’d bagged something a bit special.

This little reptile, which I first took to be one of the kids’ plastic toys, turned out to be a common lizard. Common in name, but very rarely seen (by us at any rate), it was minus a tail, and its back had been a little mauled. But all its limbs were working, and given that lizards are cold–blooded and it was still early in the morning, we refused to draw any conclusions from its lack of speed on the kitchen floor.

After some gawping and picture-taking, we took it down to the local playing fields and set it down on a warm patch of bare earth, beside some long grass. We’re not expecting to see it again, but I suspect we’ll keep an eye to the ground anyway when we’re down there in the future.

A few people I’ve told about it today have expressed their surprise – lizards just aren’t associated with our country. Many of us probably think first of geckos scaling walls in the Mediterranean on a warm summer evening, or the ones that manically alternate their feet as they stand on fiercely hot Saharan sand-dunes.

But lizards are apparently quite widespread here too, with the common variety being found all over Britain and Ireland. There are even other species of lizards in the UK - the endangered sand lizard is still found in a handful of places, while the wall lizard (a foreign import) now seems well established in a few spots along the south coast.

Perhaps until they develop suckers on their feet and start to climb our houses, all lizards will remain a rather unobtrusive aspect of our natural history in the UK.