Blue-tongue lizard in the garden

Look who visited our garden today.

Blue-tongue lizard

The tongue comes out for a second as the lizard is trying to scare me away.

I only noticed it as one of my dogs, Tina was barking at something and she took up a stance as if wanting to scare something away.

Well, I thought there must be something there.  Indeed a blue-tongue lizard was hiding between a tomato and a borage plant.   It was very frightened, kept on hissing at me.  Tina must've scared it with her loud barking.

We do have a resident lizard; it's usually out at the front in good weather, and overwinters inside the fence underneath some large boulders.  But I've never seen it around the veggie beds during day time.  And I'm not sure if it was 'our' lizard or a guest.  It looked a bit younger than ours, though it's hard to tell.

We put water out in a shallow plate, but the lizard just wanted to get away as quickly as possible.

Here is a little video (sorry about the quality!), it shows how frightened the poor thing was:

So I left the lizard alone, but couldn't resist this last little recording as it was hurrying away to hide under the weedmat:

It's not good though, we can step on it while it is there.  I will have to secure the edges of the sheet later.


Have a great new year lizard, safe from dogs and cats!