New blog posts today won’t be as hard to find as the fence lizard in this picture. That’s because I’ve pre-published a couple, and if it works, they will appear in due course while Patty and I are marooned at the ear doctor’s. We also have to do our grocery shopping for the weekend.
Joe Collidge will put in his customary appearance.
In addition to being naturally hard to see when they cling to the bark of a tree, fence lizards will also circle around, like squirrels, to try to keep the tree trunk between you and then. But they do get tame and friendly if you keep them a while and treat them nicely.
Jambo, boys ‘n’ girls! Mr. Nature here, with the humble fence lizard. My home state of New Jersey is but poorly endowed with lizards, but we do have the Eastern Fence Lizard, one of my favorites. The lizard in this video is a Western Fence Lizard from California, almost the same thing.
The “push-ups” that these lizards do, mostly the males, is a territorial display. It means “get lost!” Most of the lizards in the iguanid family–dozens and dozens of species–make this display, as well as puffing themselves up, showing the dewlap, etc. There are even some Old World agamid family lizards that do push-ups. This is a mystery to me, that totally unrelated lizards should resort to the same threat display.
I once had fence lizards and one of the females laid eggs. We caught her doing it, and so were able to contact the Staten Island Zoo for instructions as to how to care for the eggs. They were good instructions, and all two dozen eggs hatched into absolutely perfect little lizards.
At night the little ones used to bury themselves in cedar shavings with only their heads left showing. One morning our granddaughter came into the living room and saw them like that–only the tiny heads scattered here and there–and totally freaked out. She was sure some fiend had come in the middle of the might and beheaded the baby lizards. But Mrs. Nature was quickly able to reassure her otherwise.
Fence lizards eat live bugs and can be kept together in an aquarium without your having to worry about them assassinating one another. They tame rather quickly and are altogether nice lizards.
Phoebe, you asked for it, so here you go: a baby fence lizard. That’s somebody’s knuckle he’s resting on. They grow up to be about six inches long, but they’re already perfectly formed when hatched–albeit only an inch long or so.
I had some of these guys in an aquarium, and one day, out of the blue, Patty cried, “Look! She’s laying eggs!” The biggest female was indeed laying eggs, about two dozen of them. A quick phone call to the reptile house at the Staten Island Zoo gave me the information I needed to take care of the eggs–put ’em in a cookie tin full of sphagnum moss, don’t let it get too damp, and keep it in a quiet, dark place until they hatched. And by Jove, every last one of them hatched, giving me two dozen tiny lizards that looked exactly like adults.
These are among the very few lizards native to New Jersey, which meant I didn’t have to meet any exotic dietary requirements for them or worry too much about temperature variations in my apartment. It was also the only time I ever had any lizard eggs that actually hatched. My European wall lizards laid eggs, but I never knew about it until the eggs had all dried out from being buried in gravel. Someone shoulda told me!
