It sometimes happens that when you take a photo, you know that it will be quite some time before you get an opportunity to take a more interesting one. And that happened yesterday, when Paula and I were walking down the road that runs alongside our local river on our way to the wet market in Sheung Shui to stock up on fruit. It was a Sunday, so there was no construction work, and everything was quiet.
Suddenly, I noticed a lizard directly in front of me—I would have stepped on it in my next stride had I not seen it. It was clearly taking advantage of the warm sun, because it made no attempt to run away, and both of us were able to take several photos from a variety of different angles. The photos that I’ve chosen to use were all taken by Paula:
Naturally, I wanted to see whether I could identify the species, and after consulting a number of websites on the subject, I’ve concluded that it’s a changeable lizard (
Calotes versicolor), the only member of the agamid family that is native to Hong Kong. This individual was 30–35cm long, almost two-thirds of which was its tail.
Not sure why it stayed steadily to let us take photo, although we saw three dead snakes with varied size (between one to two feet long) lying in roads as we cycled on Saturday.
ReplyDeleteWe certainly don’t see many live snakes, and they hardly ever hang around to have their photos taken.
DeleteLove the photos - I recall meeting up with lizards when rock climbing as they liked the deeper hand holds.
ReplyDeleteWhen we first moved to the Outward Bound School in 1969 there were plenty of different snakes around but when we returned there in 1980 we only saw Cobra, Python, Rat snake and Pit viper - Guess the others found a quieter place to call home.
You’re lucky to have seen a python. In all the years I’ve been in Hong Kong, I’ve had just one (brief) sighting.
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