After Susan got home last night she found the breakfast nook area rug bunched up and when she went to straighten it out she found a lizard’s tail underneath it. Curious and concerned as to whether the rest of the lizard was inside the house either intact or in separate parts, she soon found our best lizard-hunting cat Jiggy focusing his attention on a corner of the kitchen where the tail-less alligator lizard sat.
Leaving the lizard be, she fed the animals and then shuffled everyone into the study so she could wrangle without interruption the seemingly uninjured (or at least not additionally so) critter into a paper bag that she then put outside.
Before bed I moved the bag over next to the river rock pile and turned it over on its side so that it could mosey out at its leisure. But this morning the lizard was still in the bag, so not wanting to give Jig a chance to finish the job it started yesterday, I decided to put the reptile in with our other reptile, Buster the tortoise, to give it a chance to recuperate without risk of cat attacks.
Well dang if the laidback thing didn’t hunker down in its temporary digs and allow me this charming portrait of it among the wood chips, which makes it look quite snake-like (click image for the bigger picture):
Shortly thereafter Buster became quite curious and departed from her food to see what was going on. Something of a standoff ensued as the two reptiles regarded each other:
Eventually Buster bailed back to her breakfast, but before I left for work I did one last check and found Buster standing where the lizard had been and the lizard at the other end of the hutch. I may stop off at Petsmart on the way home and pick up something lizards might like to eat, but the plan will be to let it go most likely tonight or no later than tomorrow night.
UPDATE (7.31): Well, I came home last night with a “Can O’ Crickets” purchased from a Petco on the way, but a thorough search showed that while the hutch is tortoise escape-proof, apparently for lizards not so much. Still that’s a good sign that the critter is healthy. Let’s just hope its continued road to recovery doesn’t intersect with any more cats.
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