How Garden City became home to tiny lizards
A ruins lizard, or wall lizard, at the Garden City Nursery School in West Hempstead. Credit: Newsday Photo / Bill Davis
If you travel around the village of Garden City, you might come across a lizard sneaking around. They are not a very common animal for this area, so I decided to investigate and find out how they came here. I didn’t have to look very far. I visited the website www.gcbirdsanctuary.org and found a whole story about them.
The lizards seen in the Garden City area are a species named lacertids, and they are called ruins lizards or wall lizards. According to the website, a store owner in West Hempstead had a shipment sent to him, and they either didn’t sell very well and he set them free, or they escaped and they went all over town. There once were fewer than 50, but their population has grown. Now there are lizards all over Garden City and other nearby communities.
