Lizards - legged and legless

It might look dead but that is just a survival strategy. It was and still is (I hope) very much alive. Made me feel more alive for encountering it too.

Here it is back upright and loving my colour-matched gloves:

The common lizard, seemingly not as common as it was when I was a kid in North Devon but maybe that is just nostalgia. I found it under some weed suppressant sheeting on an allotment patch. We used to put down corrugated iron roofing pieces in the fields as kids and then rush to be the one who got to lift it after a week of no checking. Woodlice, slugs, spiders, earthworms, centipedes, snails...and then a Wow! moment when a mouse or lizard or newt or slow worm is spotted.

That is a nice segway into my other find under the weed suppressant: slow worms. Lots and lots of slow worms. Definitely a Wow! moment for me. Just look at them. Wow!

I let them go under some wooden boards I put down last autumn, specially for slow worms and lizards. Chance to relive that childhood excitement of the first lift of the week, hopefully with a class of kids waiting, some leaning in with anticipation, some holding back from the assumed threat of a killer mouse or giant child-eating spider.

I really hope to see them again. I miss them. Especially the lizard. I won't go down the doom and gloom route, not here, not now, but I hope the kids get to see them again in the next few weeks and find them again in fifty years for other kids to marvel at.

If you are out in the garden this weekend, why not think about habitat for these guys. Pop something down for them to live under. Pile some garden waste up in the corner. And be careful when you first start digging around in your compost for you might, if you are lucky like me, find one of these metallic beauties to Wow! at.