Lizards: our unlikely neighbors

In nature there are many fascinating animals that often go unnoticed.

When I was in high school I encountered one of these "under the radar" animals, a small shiny lizard. At the time I didn't even know that there were lizards here. To me lizards were animals that lived in much warmer climates, especially in deserts.

Within minutes I had it crawling up my arm and all over my shoulders and back. With its tiny claws it was easily able to grip and traverse my long-sleeved shirt. It was a northern coal skink, one of four species of lizards that reside in Pennsylvania.

Since my first skink encounter, I have seen three more over the past decade. The first three had been juveniles, easily distinguishable from adults by their bluish tails. However, last week my father showed me a six-inch adult coal skink that he had found.

Three of my sightings have been adjacent to my mother's flower garden, a two-tiered terrace with small rock walls. Apparently the skinks like all of the nooks and crannies. It certainly does offer plenty of cover and many insects.

Although rarely seen, skinks are relatively common in Pennsylvania. This one was crawling around the author's property in Cameron County.

Ideal coal skink habitat is damp, moist woods that contain an abundance of leaf litter or loose rocks. It is within these locations that skinks prefer to hunt during the daytime for insects among the leaves and rotting logs.

Like many lizards and salamanders, skinks have the ability to lose their tail in order to decoy predators into attacking the wriggling object, instead of killing its owner. Later, they are able to regenerate a new tail.

Coal skinks are different than the many species of salamanders inhabiting our region. Salamanders are amphibians, but skinks are reptiles. They have skin that is impermeable to water, allowing them to withstand drier environments without dehydrating.

Reptiles have hard or leathery-shelled eggs and lay them on land. Whereas salamanders undergo a metamorphosis as their larva changes to an adult, skinks come out of their shells as miniature adults and simply grow.

If you do encounter northcentral Pennsylvania's only lizard, consider yourself lucky. These small animals are very secretive and their small populations are quite scattered and isolated within their range.

I recently fished a section of stream that I hadn't stepped foot on since last July. In my previous visit, I was photographing dead fish lining the banks and shallows of the Driftwood Branch after the Norfolk Southern sodium hydroxide spill. It was therapeutic to be back on this same stretch of stream, swinging tandem wetflies through one of my favorite runs.

I was fishing for trout that had been planted into the stream this spring. Without keeping this in mind, it was easy to forget about the chemical spill that had worked its way through the stream last summer. But deep down inside I knew that the baitfish and smallmouth bass populations in the stream would be depressed for some time.

This spring there has been considerably less fishing pressure on the Driftwood Branch, previously one of the area's most popular trout streams. While I'm sure high, cold water has had something to do with this, I'll bet many out of town anglers have stayed away as a result of the chemical spill.

From what I have observed, insect populations in the stream have remained healthy. Although I haven't seen much surface action from the trout, caddis and red quill hatches during April seemed heavier this year where I fish than what I remember them being in the past. Hopefully, plentiful insect hatches will continue through May and June.