The Lizard King

The Island's only such species, the Italian wall lizard rules the roost - and imaginations of its host

By Bryn Nelson | Staff Writer

May 11, 2003

Two years before astronauts walked on the moon, a few dozen colonists took their first small steps onto another foreign landscape. The exact details are lost to legend, but the settlers soon discovered that Garden City wasn't such a bad place to land.

For a lizard.

Various tales have sprung up to explain the emigration of a small group of wall lizards from the north of Italy to the suburbs of Long Island. The most likely story involves a 1967 shipment destined for a now-defunct pet supply store that was waylaid by a minor accident, a broken crate and some very swift escapees.

No one knows for sure how many of the cold-blooded reptiles are now basking in the sunshine of suburbia. But they have adapted remarkably well to their adopted homeland, and they've extended far beyond Garden City.

As in their native precincts of Italy and southern Europe, the lizards are thriving in landscapes shaped by humans, in pockets of Nassau County as well as in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. A diet of spiders and crickets and other small invertebrates, a sunny spot to provide warmth and aid metabolism, a haven in the cracks and crevices of walls and gardens - all are abundant here.

The lizards have proliferated along the grassy corridors of railroad tracks, drainage ditches, and power lines. Others have likely hitched rides to new homes in the pockets of admirers, or even in piles of mulch.

"I'm sure there are tens of thousands, and they're spreading fast," says Hofstra University herpetologist Russell Burke.

Despite the advance, the tale of New York's Italian wall lizard population has not followed the familiar plot line of an invasive species wreaking havoc on the natives. Long Island has no lizards of its own, and the wall lizards seem to have filled an environmental niche that was previously vacant. As far as anyone can tell, they have yet to cause any harm.

Instead, their impact is perhaps most apparent in the childlike wonder that follows in their wake. A biologist laughs at their antics in a nursery school garden. A father eagerly maps their spread. Children clamor to glimpse them on a playground.

Sometimes nature's lessons come in unexpected ways.

Burke has picked a warm September day for fishing, though his black fishing pole seems strangely out of place among impatiens and ornamental shrubs. The small noose dangling from the pole offers another suggestion that this will be no ordinary fishing expedition.

Burke is after the wall lizards, a source of both academic research and personal fascination. He has conducted many of his field studies here, in the three-tiered side garden and spacious backyard of the Garden City Nursery School.

At first, the garden appears deserted. Then a single lizard scurries across a railroad tie retainer and behind a small evergreen shrub. Within seconds, the creatures known as Podarcis sicula are everywhere. Grass-green backs. Mottled black and brown patterns with turquoise spots on either side. Basking on ornamental rocks, guarding bits of territory, surveying the scene from the safety of cracks in the garden's lower echelons.

With a fisherman's patience, Burke moves the noose ever closer to the head of a wary lizard. A quick jerking motion and he's made his first catch of the day, a 5-inch-long juvenile male with a dull green back, caught harmlessly around its head.

Burke paints the lizard on each side with a red marker, just as he's marked others with identifiable combinations of blue or black or green. His next catch - a 7-inch-long adult female with a typically narrow head - receives two red blotches on each side.

After another few minutes, he's caught the one he's been after all day, an elusive adult male that measures about 8 inches in length and has his own territory near the far end of the garden. The lizard promptly rewards Burke's efforts by biting him.

"Oh, that's enough of a pinch to hurt." He laughs as the lizard glares at him.

The herpetologist points to a row of scales where the lizard's hind legs intersect its abdomen, a region identifiable on males by a brown spot. It's from the femoral glands here that the male secretes its distinctive pheromone, a chemical calling card of sorts.

"It's probably like, 'I'm a big tough guy and this is my territory,'" Burke says of the scented message. A male lizard basking in the sunshine to regulate his body temperature and synthesize Vitamin D also may be marking his territory as he lays flat against the railroad ties, but Burke can only speculate.

The big male gets two blue marks on each side.