Today was freezing cold and rather bleak here, but there was one odd and interesting moment. Liz and I had been doing the Saturday Farmers Market and came home after a usefully profitable morning, having sold enough plants, seeds, flowers, herb bunches and fruit from my garden to pay our stall fee, do the meat, fruit and vegetable purchases for our households for the week, and have a little money left over. We were happily unpacking such goods as we hadn’t sold when we found a juvenile bluetongue lizard lying on her back in the driveway, not moving. At first we thought she was dead, because she felt as cold as the day, but I could feel a faint pulse as she lay in my hand. So I very slowly and carefully warmed her just by contact until she started to move, then found her a place where she could do her winter dormancy thing inside a stack of old plant pots which I stashed in a cosy spot under our small water tank, where she would be protected from the bitter weather we have coming, and in close proximity to a lot of baby snails for when she wakes up. Such lizards do not fully hibernate in our climate, but go dormant and sometimes wake to eat if there are warm days in winter. I didn’t want to bring her into the house where she might overheat and need to be kept as a pet. I think she is one of the three offspring that Slide, the big old bluetongue who lives under the woodbox on our back porch, birthed late this summer. I hope she will survive. They are charming creatures, and I don’t mind if they eat the odd strawberry here and there, because they are also very good pest controllers.
