At this time of the year I'm a bit of a lizard myself: very slow to get moving of a morning, and seeking out the sun to warm up. I'm always amazed how much difference a bit of direct sunlight on your skin makes on a chilly winter's day. It's already too cold for the little skinks that tend to hang around urban gardens and parks, and they've mostly gone into brumation, a state of slowed metabolism and action that they adopt to get through the colder months. But that means it's a good time to think about protecting and creating habitat for them, with one eye on their current sluggish state and another on their needs come the spring.
Gardening for lizards is relatively straightforward, as long as you're happy to adapt your garden or other area to their needs. As local zoologist Garry Daly has said, "To attract reptiles it is best to have a messy backyard with a wide variety of different plant species and a range of hiding places. Habitat that reptiles use to hide and forage include mulch, dead timber, sheets of bark and stacks of rocks. Consider putting in ponds for Water Skinks, as well as frogs. Reptiles like a patchwork of places where they can bask and shuffle to cover. Rock piles and retaining walls are excellent habitat."
So that's pretty easy then! Grow a diverse range of native grasses, shrubs, ground covers and trees, don't fuss too much about the mess the plants produce, and maybe have a water body available. One other suggestion I heard recently from a committed Landcare volunteer was not to plant too densely, and to leave some clear areas between shrubs and grasses for the lizards to make their way around.
What are you likely to get in the way of urban lizards? Well, there's a bit of variety, beyond the Blue-tongues. We often see Grass Skinks (Eulamprus delicata) and Garden Skinks (E. guichenoti). Less common are species such as the Three-toed Skink (Saiphos equalis), a species that lives underground and is usually only seen if its habitat is disturbed, and the Eastern Water-skink (Eulamprus quoyii), which is fairly easy to spot in coastal locations such as Puckey's Estate in Fairy Meadow.
Illawarra is even home to a new species of skink that has not yet been formally described! It's a species in the complex currently known as MacCoy's Skink (Anepischetosia maccoyi) a cool-adapted skink of south-eastern Australia.
This new species (currently dubbed Anepischetosia sp. A [Illawarra]) only lives in the subtropical-influenced rainforests and wet forests along the Illawarra escarpment.
Once this species is described, it's likely to go straight into the 'endangered' category given its limited distribution and the number of pressures on the escarpment. You can read all about it in this amazingly-titled article in Conservation Genetics: Cold creeping things: deep phylogeographic structure in a naturally fragmented cool-adapted skink (Scincidae; Anepischetosia) from south-eastern Australia, by Rhiannon Schembri and colleagues.
Some benefits of having lizards around include that they eat a wide range of insects, including mosquitoes in some cases, and that they're really cool. In some cases they're even super-local, occurring nowhere else in the world, or endangered! What more could you want to get you started creating lizard habitat?
