Thursday, April 21, 2011

Dig the mystery skink:
My friend Tony Croasdale (birder and environmental extraordinaire) called me this afternoon. I was working from home, so when he told me he had found a skink crossing 47th St. between Warrington and Springfield, I rode out to meet him. (Actually I said, "No you did not!" and he said, "Yes I did! It's biting my hand right now!" Then I got up.)

This is a five-lined skink, distinguishable by some of the scales around the lip and ear from another skink that lives in DE, the broadhead (E. laticeps). In this case the lip (labial) scales are ambiguous (I count 5 labials, not the 4 that a five-line should have) but the ear scales (post-labials) look five-line.

Now I know there are snakes in this neighborhood (brown snakes - Storeria dekayi), and I wouldn't be surprised to find a redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus), but a skink?

Rumor has it that there might still be five-lined skinks (Eumeces fasciatus) in Philadelphia, but only at the woolier fringes, S. Philly around the bottom of FDR Park, for example. Moreover, unlike the secretive brown snakes and redback salamanders, these skinks are public critters. We would see them hanging around gardens and old walls, just like I've seen them skittering around in South Jersey and upstate PA. They're not as obvious as anoles, but still I would have seen them, or one of my friends who live right near that corner would have told me about them (to be sure, I've been asking them - no one so far, including gardeners with boys, reports skinks).

Thus I am pretty sure this girl [note - since I wrote this I have changed my mind re the sex of the skink. As its head has gotten redder and redder, it is clearly a male, whose heads get red during the breeding season.] is a hitchhiker. Tony found her - saved her from an oncoming school bus, actually - right near a church that's undergoing a renovation, with lots of contractors from NJ and DE trucking in loads of equipment and materials. This is just the kind of lizard to have been chilling in a heap of scaffolding in some rural or suburban contractor's yard, only to wake up in the city.

Tony and I tried to talk to the guys working on the church but couldn't nail down a specific likely home. Since we don't know where she came from, I'm loathe to just let her go - relocated adult herps generally don't relocate well - and am putting out feelers for anyone who would like her as an educational/display animal. I would rather not keep her, so next up would be anyone looking for a lizard to keep (to be clear, this would not be a sale - that would illegal. I'm just looking for a good home for her). These apparently do well in captivity as long as you don't handle them. Lizards are a little more high maintenance than the snakes I keep (and I already have enough/too many snakes), so I'd rather not hold onto her for too long.


David Steen said...

I agree counting the labial scales is not a 100% accurate way of assigning species, but if you've already come to the conclusion the animal is a transient, can you be confident it's not a laticeps after all?


Bernard Brown said...

Good points, but the more I look at it the more the head looks redder to me, and without the beefy head of a laticeps I'm feeling more confident I'm looking at a male fasciatus. I hardly ever get skinks in hand and probably shouldn't have guessed so quickly on the sex at first. Also, laticeps are sort of at the edge of their range south of here in DE (something like only one vouchered from PA, and none since), while we're solidly in fasciatus range all around, so greater likelihood of a fasciatus hitchhiking in, leaning me towards giving the tie to the fasciatus even if it weren't looking more and more male.

Also, I found a nature center nearby that wants it, so I'm happy it'll end up as a nice educational subject.