While my love affair with nature began at an early age, I actually began identifying creatures and observing them and their behaviour in my college days, around the late 1980s. My early interest was in birds, then I started looking at butterflies, and soon I was intrigued by the whole natural world.
My interest in reptiles started only in the 1990s when I managed to lay my hands on a pair of books on lizards and snakes written by an Englishman named M A Smith. These books were written in the 1930s and for many reptile watchers, are still considered the bible on Indian reptiles.
During my early reptile watching days in the 1990s, I was based in Pune. During this time, we would go for weekend trips to nearby forests. One of the first intriguing lizards that I identified on my own was a tiny ‘matchstick’-like lizard called the Spotted Supple Skink (Lygosoma punctata). Skinks are lizards that have shiny scales on their bodies. This leads many people to believe that they are snakes or similar to snakes.
In fact, many people call them saap ki mausi in Hindi, which means ‘snake’s aunt’!
The spotted supple skink is a petite-looking lizard. It is semi-fossorial, which means that it spends part of its life just under the topsoil or under stones and boulders. It is also found hiding in leaf litter. This small skink is not easy to see as it keeps darting from one stone to another or hiding under leaves or fallen tree trunks.
Any attempt to catch it can lead to a merry chase in which you will end up with lots of mud and dry leaves on your clothes, but no skink! These skinks often enter our houses, especially ones located at the edges of forests.
Actually it is not advisable to try and catch the skink as it is quite delicate. Skinks have a defence mechanism that helps them break off their tails when threatened.
The tails will continue to wiggle after being broken off and this serves to distract the predator, while the skink itself escapes. The tails grow back over time but this means that the skink has to spend precious energy to grow its tail back.
The spotted supple skink has a row of small black spots on its shiny-bronzed body, which is how it gets its common name. Juvenile skinks have a red tail, which becomes pinkish-brown in the adult. These creatures mainly feed on small insects such as termites.
Many people have told me that the saap ka mausi is venomous and has a painful bite. Nothing can be further from the truth. Skinks are harmless creatures and cannot even break the skin on our fingers if they try to bite us. And they definitely don’t have any venom. In fact, like many other creatures, they play a crucial role in the web of life, by eating insects and being part of the food chain for many other larger creatures. So don’t ever hurt the saap ka mausi!
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