The lizard spring

A PHRASE long overdue for deletion from the mantras of the weathermen is surely "a risk of showers". The return of rain and soft days has seemed a positively Portian mercy in a landscape starved of spring.

Another long, hot summer may, indeed, teach us real concern about water on an island supposed to be drenched in it. We have dredged the rivers, drained the bogs for turf and forestry, grazed the hills bare of heather - all of these conspire to rush rain into the sea at a time when climate change could make every downpour precious.

As reservoirs dwindle and echoes creep along the aquifers, we could, at least, show a little respect to the rain gods. Who are these people, exactly, to whom showers are a "risk"? Must common good be mediated by the welfare of city bus queues, or of people lounging pinkly on Sandymount Strand? Rather should we tilt up our faces gladly, to be droppethed on from heaven, and even, in suitable gardens, gambol naked and glittering on the lawn.

Anyway . . . A week or so before the rain came I was travelling over the mountains south of Killarney (by a boreen that brought us past The Highest Pub in Ireland - one, no doubt, of many) and marvelling at the sere appearance of the hills.

Given that last summer drew out the purple moorgrass, Molinia, to record production of leaf, the winter's frosts have left it lying dead in tress after tress of platinum blonde, a colour at once barren and sadly beautiful, like the sun bleached uplands of Spain. This, not unnaturally, brought lizards into my mind. They were still there when, in the Burren next day, I got out on a quiet by road for a pee.

April is a very good time for spotting lizards, being, with May the month for breeding. And the art of lizard stalking is well set out by Ferdia Marnell in his notes for the Common Lizard Survey, lately launched. Ferdia is Conservation Officer with the Irish Wildlife Federation* and already a considerable authority on Ireland's newts.

The newt is an amphibian, the lizard our only native reptile (but you knew that), and while the newt spends most of the spring and summer in ponds and streams, the lizard is most often seen basking in a sheltered, sunny place.

It is especially common in the Burren, as one might expect, where the heat and stillness of high summer are focused, sometimes intolerably, within the walls of stone built forts. But the lizard also seems to thrive in the humidity of bogs and is found throughout Connemara, for example, from sea level to the summits of considerable hills.

In fact, Ferdia Marnell's list of "typical habitats" is so catholic including pylon lines through woods and forests, suburban wasteland and railway embankments, that you might try looking almost anywhere that seems a good place for sleeping it off.

Time of day seems to matter - best in April, says Ferdia, between 8.30 a.m. and 11 a.m. and between 4.00 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. But the sort of feel good sunshine that follows days of rain or dullness is likely to bring lizards out at any hour.

It's how you look for them that matters: a sort of slow drift forwards with vision stretched out about two or three metres ahead. Keep the sun behind you, he says, and look beyond your shadow, or to the side of it, with lots of stops to scan the likely basking sites. He suggests using "close focus" binoculars, but most of us only have the sort for watching birds in the next hedge, which are no use at all.

LIZARDS rarely trust the world enough to bask completely in the open, and look for patches of sun with deep cover close by. On my boreen in the Burren, this meant searching the southern slopes of mossy hummocks, and hollows in bare limestone that might serve as a lizard's solarium. An adult can grow to 18 centimetres, but the markings on its yellowy brown, sometimes greyish, body can blend its form uncannily well into feathery mosses and lichens, or the random patterns of stone.

A fleeting glimpse is mostly what one gets, as the lizard darts for cover. In that case, advises Ferdia, don't go rummaging through the vegetation but mark the spot, back off and creep back quietly in 10 minutes. I'd like to say I saw one, but I didn't. My last lizard was basking on a wall in Aran in September, which is the other good month for seeing them.

Lizards bask because they are cold blooded and need warming to 30C in order to dash about in pursuit of spiders and centipedes. In fact, in our cool climate, the lizard could only find its niche by means of a special adaptation. Most lizards need a much warmer sun and lay their eggs outside the body.

But our species is Lacerta vivipara - the female keeps her fertilised eggs inside her body, then makes a hole in some moist place and lays her young alive, usually in July. There could be up to eight in a litter, about three to four centimetres long at birth, and within hours they are catching their own small spiders or aphids.

There doesn't have to be any special reason for a Common Lizard Survey, except that there hasn't been one before. That the numbers of the species seem to be diminishing elsewhere in north west Europe almost goes without saying, as wild habitats of all sorts are encroached upon. If the survey achieves nothing else, it may enlighten some of the many people who had no idea that there were lizards in Ireland at all.