Not a snake, but close!

The natural world is filled with so many wonderful creatures that it is difficult, if not impossible, to know all of them. Yet if we keep our eyes open, our ears peeled and allow our curiosity to be tickled a whole new world waits to be explored. Often our curiosity corrects misconceptions and increases our knowledge about the natural world. Such an incident happened with me a few months ago.

My wife told me that the household help, who was hanging clothes to dry in our garden, had seen a snake. I stepped out of the house to investigate and looked high and low for a snake but I couldn’t find one. Then out of the corner of my eye I espied the slightest of movement below some dried leaves. Looking closely I realised that there was no snake in the garden, but a lizard, called the Keeled Grass Skink (Eutropis carinata)

The Keeled Grass Skink is a lizard that lives on the ground and can be seen during the day. It is quite common in gardens, forests and scrub, living amidst the leaf litter both in cities and villages. The skink, one of many that are found in India, has scales covering its entire body. Hence many people mistakenly consider it to be a snake.

The Keeled Grass Skink can grow up to 15 cm in size including its tail, and its large size supports this mistaken belief. In fact the skink is a lizard and not a snake. In north India the skink is called ‘Saap ki mausi’, which literally means ‘snake’s relative’!

While the Keeled Grass Skink is usually shiny bronze-brown in colour, during the breeding season, the male skink develops bright red colours on its body in the hope of attracting a female. During the non-breeding season the male loses its colour to become duller thereby hiding itself from predators.

Skinks have another nifty trick up their sleeves to protect themselves. When skinks are sitting on the ground, or under a leaf, they gently move their tails. Often this leads potential predators to target the moving part of the lizard. The skink then sheds its tail and escapes.

Often, even after the tail is shed, the tail continues to move, thereby attracting the attention of the predator while the skink scurries to  safety. Over time the tail of the skink will regenerate so that the skink can pull this trick over a potential predator all over again!