Where to find garden skinks

Male skinks are highly territorial and aggressively attack other males during spring. You might even find several skinks locked together in a big jumble, all holding on to each other. Odd to see, but this is thought to be a kind of territorial behaviour.

Skinks are great backyard buddies as their sleek bodies and quick reflexes make them excellent hunters of insects. Having skinks around will help control crickets , moths and cockroaches. You can encourage skinks around your place by providing rocks, wood such as logs and sticks, and by leaving leaf litter around for them to hide amongst.

Skinks have a clever defence mechanism. Please select 1 field to search. Species origin Invasive Native Other. Often caught and eaten by cats Skinks are the most diverse and largest group of lizards in Australia with around species Only the Southern garden skink L.

Size 8 - 10 cm nose to end of tail. Behaviour Diet Small insects and other invertebrates. These pest-controlling hunters can survive easily in your garden.

By including logs, sticks and leaf mulch in your garden you can help to protect them. You will most often see them sunning themselves on rocks or bricks, but as they are prey for many birds, they will disappear like lightning if they sense any threats. A place to hide — lizards have a good chance of escaping predators if your garden includes logs , small bundles of sticks and dense ground cover. Their eggs being dug up — gardeners or animals sometimes uncover their nests.

Eggs are most prone to being disturbed between early summer and autumn. Photo: David Cook. Skinks Go Back. What do they look like? Others, like the three-towed skink, will devour worms, beetle larvae and centipedes, while the bigger of the skinks, the bluetongues and land mullets, adore their fruits and vegies, but also LOVE a meal of snails.

But, it is this love of pests that often leads to their demise in urban settings. Use of pesticides, insecticides and other chemicals within gardens can have a detrimental impact on the skinks food sources and can, in the case of snail pellets, result in the death of blue tongues if they gobble up snails that have ingested this poison.

Reduction of garden chemicals is one easy way that we can encourage skinks back to our gardens. Dogs, and especially cats, are also generally not good news for garden skinks. Another way to safely encourage skinks into the garden is by understanding and creating of suitable habitats for them.

If you keep pet lizards, creating a suitable outdoor space for them to bask and sunbathe is a great idea. Emmaline, as a long-time skink lover, has some great ideas for designing a garden space just for skinks, and they include:. Fri pm, Rpt Sun pm. Video Player failed to load. Play Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.

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