Skink wars

A couple of days ago I posted a photo of a Cunningham's Skink on our deck.
I knew at that time that one was hanging out in our garage and I assumed it was doing a good job of controlling the flies in there.  However, what goes in must come out:
 This is a typical reptile turd with the white blob of guanine on the tip.  (In Tanzania that was crucial, since it distinguished gecko (= mjusi) crap from rat (=panya kubwa)  poop.)  There was getting to be a fair bit of this around so I decided that Mr Skink had to go.

This image is a mudmap of our garage.  The green line is the route of the rout!
Point 1 is this set of shelves, which are normally full of stuff and set back against the wall.  I knew Mr Skink was behind that so took all the stuff off.  In fact he was right up the top and  when I cleared it off he bolted behind the cupboard visible in the background (point 2).
After shifting the cupboard out a bit The Skink was spotted clinging to the wall about 1.5m off the ground.  On being poked with a pole he bolted under the cupboard.  Removing the kick board let me apply a few more pokes which got him out
Did he go out the open rolladoor?  No Siree, he went under my car (point 3) out the other side and under the freezer (point 4).   He then made a great mistake of turning round so that the tip of his tail poked out.  I grabbed that and when Frances slightly tilted the freezer out came a rather unhappy Cunningham's Skink.  As I got him over a large plastic box.....
.. the tip of his tail broke off,
He still ended up in the box in which he was taken down to a nice rocky area near the Creek.  Hopefully he will stay there and not come back up to the house.

That hope was forlorn.  A couple of weeks later we were sitting in the garage - tidying it up for the removalists - and noticed the small dog displaying great interest in the (laden again) shelving.  Sure enough, there was Mr Skink.  This time he ended up going through a  less than 1 cm high gap and under the house, where he can stay.

Why he came back from a nice rockpile to the garage is a great mystery!  On reflection, the tail was pointy so either:

  • it had regrown in the 15 days  since episode 1; or
  • it was a different skink,

Comments

Ian Fraser said…
Oh! And I’d always liked you Martin....
4 January 2019 at 21:48:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
e I done wrong? No animals were (permanently) harmed in the making of this post!
21 January 2019 at 06:30:00 GMT+11
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