Lizard’s odyssey
Trapping a half-metre-long lizard was definitely not how a Palmerston North woman expected her evening to go.
On Tuesday, Sophie Clark was spending a relaxing night with a friend drinking a couple glasses of wine in her backyard when she spotted a rustling bush along the fence line.
She was stunned to find her pet scrapping with something large and scaly.
Clark thought it was a snake, until it scuttled up and over the fence, its blue tongue flickering, into her yard and she realised it was a ‘‘massive lizard".
It was actually a blue tongue skink, an Australian lizard that grows to about 45 centimetres long. They are a popular exotic pet in New Zealand.
The cat and lizard continued attacking each other and Clark worried they’d both be seriously hurt, so she scooped up her cat and rushed her inside before coming back for the lizard.
This proved easier said than done. ‘‘It was pretty scary. It was hissing and snapping at anything that got near it.’’
Clark eventually managed to catch the lizard in a metal bin as it crawled up her wall, after a tense chase around her Grey St yard, and she made a Facebook post asking for help to find the owner.
A worried Christine Tan was reunited with her missing pet two hours later. The lizard was called Odysseus, after a mythological Greek king known for his cunning, who was cursed to wander for 10 years after the fall of Troy.
And the lizard lived up to his name. Tan, a Wildbase veterinarian, adopted Odysseus when he was brought into the clinic as a lost animal and his old owner couldn’t be found.
‘‘I thought it was escape-proof, but he found a way out. Skinks have short legs, but they’re very good climbers and he got up to a small gap I thought was unreachable.
But unfortunately, Odysseus’ story doesn’t have a happy ending.
He must have been stepped on or run over during his travels and his injuries were too severe to survive. Odysseys had to be put down.