Pink-tongued skink

A couple of nights before our wedding, Gam and I were cleaning out our garage so my uncle and his partner could park their car in there. I'd gathered an armful of clothes to take upstairs (including the shirt we'd discovered that Gam wound up wearing for the wedding!) and had just got to the door from the foyer to the main garden of the complex, when I spied a lizard sitting on the mat near the door. At first glance it looked like a baby bluetongue, but I noticed its colouring was different and its face almost snakelike in comparison to the broad, almost innocent face of a bluetongue. I dropped all the clothes on the floor and went to pick it up- it almost managed a speedy getaway, and when I caught it it fought fiercely, trying to bite me and wrap its tail around my arm so it could lever its head around to reach my fingers! In the excitement it first bit its own arm, then its tail, so I pulled out the tail, changed my grip and hurried with it to get some photos.



I held onto it in one hand while I got the camera and, using only my right hand, managed to switch the camera on to the right setting, flip the little view-screen around and press the 'macro' setting. Then the stupid camera informed me that there was no memory card in the machine. Argh! I then had to go and find the memory card, unmount it from the computer and insert it into the camera using only one hand...



The lizard never stopped trying to bite me, which made the photos difficult, as it also kept biting itself- seemingly not even noticing that it was chomping on its own tail when it should have been trying to bite my thumb. Even the fiercer young bluetongues tend to calm down after a period of being held, but this young lizard was incredibly fiesty. I noticed it had much longer, more elegant toes than bluetongues do, and its tail was also comparatively much longer than a bluetongue's, as well as being slimmer and more tapered. Its markings were only a sort of dun-tan and black, and were significantly different from the markings of a bluetongue. Its tongue was quite a bright pink, and it didn't flicker out curiously- I only saw it during its persistent attempts to do violence to my hand!



Then it pooed on me.


I was aware that lizards can poo on a person who tries to pick them up- I'd been pooed on by a small skink once as a kid- and it didn't come as a surprise that this lizard in particular would use everything in its arsenal against me. What I wasn't prepared for was the utterly obnoxious smell of the poo. It was seriously one of the nastiest things I have smelled in a while- a real chemical weapon! I took the lizard out the back and placed it in an old fishbowl containing some dirt and grass so I could wash off the poo and also show Gam.

I had a hell of a time trying to wash that lizard crap off my hand- it wasn't water soluble and simply stuck to my hand, reluctant to come off even with liberal applications of handwash and detergent. I scrubbed my hand with a bit of dry paper towel and then washed it again just to make sure it was all off (lizards can carry Salmonella, I believe). I couldn't help sniffing my hand afterward to make sure that the smell had all gone.

When I pulled it out of the bowl to show Gam, some poo that had remained on its tail got on my hand, so Gam got a whiff of the nasty stuff too. I put it back in the bowl again and washed my hand before going back with a handful of paper towel to first wipe it dry and then wrap it up to carry it safely outside to return it to the main garden. When I wrapped it up, I felt a warm, damp patch form in the paper towel as I carried it outside- the damn lizard had tried to poo on me again!



According to the websites we read when searching for the identity of this particular lizard- the pink-tongued skink, fairly common as it turns out, though I'd never seen one- the little bastard would have made a good pet. I don't think that lizard would have been happy being anyone's pet- it was by far the feistiest lizard I've ever met. Still, it's nice to know that some biodiversity remains in our neighbourhood despite the rampant over-development that's been occurring over the last 2-3 years. Our complex has probably four or five times the green space of other unit blocks with a similar number of dwellings in the area, but even a green island in a growing sea of concrete provided me with the opportunity to meet an animal I'd never come across before.