I am not really a reptile fan. I love furry animals like dogs and cats and rabbits, I adore goats and cows and I like giraffes and camels and rhinos and so on. I am very fond of having a miniature house-spider running over my hands and am sufficiently tolerant of larger house-spiders to be the resident spider-remover both at home and at work.
I’m not keen on reptiles. Snakes are the one animal I really loathe and am really scared of (except Julius, and even so I won’t watch the feeding videos) and I thought lizards would probably fit into that category as well. They don’t.
I’m not a total newcomer to the world of lizards. I saw the occasional tiny sand lizard running around the campsite on holiday in Spain or Italy as a teenager but in Cyprus I saw a lot of lizards.
The first one was a little one that scurried down the garden path on the first morning. Worthy of an exclamation but not much more. But the second one… the second was basking on the roof of Pafos Castle and it was a monster! I have never seen a lizard so big in my life. It just sat there, enjoying the sun and looking disdainfully at the tourists who were so excited. In fact, I was so excited that the first thing I did when I got back that evening was to find out what it was.
It was – to my best guess as a non-herpetologist – a sling-tailed agama, also known as a stellion, a starred agama and a painted dragon. How very exciting!
Little did I know that my first agama was to be far from my last. We saw so many of them! There were dozens of them running over the rocks at the Pafos Mosaics – everywhere we turned, another big lizard. Another dozen at Pafos Zoo, including a pair terrorising a couple of parrots and another sitting beside an enclosure cheerfully eating ants. I have 37 good lizard pictures – that’s more than the big roll of old camera film that was supposed to last the entire two weeks.
The agamas weren’t the only lizards. I also identified – or think I identified – a few skinks, a couple of fringe-fingered lizards, a mabuya or two and some that don’t match any of the pictures I’ve found. They were nice to see but the agamas were very much thunder-stealers – and they pose better for photos.
