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Summer

BERT SPINKS THINKS ABOUT SKINKS

Illustration of a person floating in a pool of water.
I have made camp half-way along the Mersey River. It’s bright and hot. A tarp’s strung up so I can read in the shade and at intervals, I venture out to swim, stripping off and dive into the deepest part of the stream. The tannin in the water turns me caramel-coloured, like a pickled carrot.

No-one is around. I haul myself out of the fresh water and remain undressed. On the hot rocks, I stretch my body out. It’s like I’m lying upon a frying pan. Whatever droplets of water were on me have evaporated in a few moments, spirited into the atmosphere.

I think it’s fair to say that most Tasmanians have mixed feelings about the sun. We need its light to live – physiologically, of course, but we also yearn for it come over the horizon in the cooler months. We long to take our clothes off, to have sunshine on our skin, to parade in bare feet, to abandon the sticky feeling of having slept in our thermals and stayed in them the whole next day.

Yet at the height of summer the sun is an ogre, ready to wreak havoc in the bush. It scorches moss and coaxes gas from the eucalyptus leaves. Some summer arvos smell inflammable. When the wind gets up, it’s like sitting under a heatpump. And we have been taught too that the sun’s touch is poisonous, that too much of its attention does bad things to our body.

None of this troubles skinks. They’re not ambivalent about sunlight. They love it unequivocally. They’re out there day after day as if they’re desperate to deepen their tan.
Illustration of a lizard.
At my Mersey campsite I am watching the metallic skink, Niveoscincus metallicus (of course). Kinks of nickel, Iron Age relics, slag from the zincworks, daggers in miniature.

Many of the stones at this section of the Mersey have been white-washed from years of flood. The lizards lying all over them look like little drizzles of balsamic vinegar. They clamber out of crevices to soak up solar power. Their blood is warmed; their heart pumps. If you look closely at a skink’s face (and they will sometimes let you) you may perceive that its mouth has turned upwards into a little smile.

The social lives of skinks is an interesting study. They cross paths and draping their bodies over one another casually, like summer lovers; sometimes they form cuddle puddles, five or six of them in a pile. There are moments of intense activity, a flurry of movement, fracases. The love-in turns to a all-in-brawl. The skinks will chase each other, briefly grappling, using their minuscule arms to try apply and a hold. In more serious scraps, they’ll gnaw at their opponent’s foot, or clamp their jaws around each other’s tails.

A solitary skink shimmies towards me. I inspect its tail, which of course can be lost – a lesson many of us learnt in childhood. There is a weakness in their vertebrae so that if the tail comes asunder, at the hands or beak of a predator, there is little blood lost or tissue damaged. It’s harder for a skink to thermoregulate without the full length of their tail but that’s better than being swallowed whole. The tail even convulses after coming off: a decoy to confuse whatever’s attacking it.
Illustration of a dead fly.
The skink, inevitably, is a hunter as well. In pursuit of its prey, skink is like a cat: it flattens itself and creeps across the ground with great caution. Its tail trembles and shivers, as if it’s electrocuted, and then it will lunge.

One of skink’s favourite snacks is the common fly. The fly, of course, has its own means of defence: flight. Its vision is vague but quick: a fly is ready to flee the scene at the first blurry sign of an assailant.

Along the Mersey, I watch the battle of wits between fly and skink. Sometimes, after three or four dives – increasingly desperate – the skink looks downright silly. But when a fly is caught in the lizard’s vice-like mouth, it’s quite an impressive sight. What a gobful! The fly buzzes fitfully till the last but eventually gives up the ghost. The skink wanders around with it, perhaps parading its triumph or possibly wondering how to go about swallowing such a beast of this size. It scurries off to a shady corner to enjoy its lunch.

Later, I put on a khaki shirt and a pair of footy shorts. I take a stout stick – half a branch off a white gum – and head upstream, walking on the rocks or wading through the river. Around me, Macleay’s swallowtails flap their mint-green wings. Petals peel off pretty prostanthera flowers and fall into runnels. Trout, fit as athletes, wait in currents, their tails wafting gently.

Summer is hard yakka. The bush is ablaze with cicadas’ calls. Within cooee, several species shriek their ceaseless sonnets. They have popped out of punctuation marks in the dirt, crawling slowly up strands of sedge or flower stalks. Summer belongs to the skinks, but cicadas can make a memorable cameo.
Illustration of person standing in a river.
From a recess in a slab of mudstone, I hear a buzzing sound. It has the soft low tone of an electric fan but it is the noise of something exerting much more energy. I follow my ear and witness a brutal scene: a redeye cicada is caught in the maw of a skink. The big insect beats its wings furiously; its only defence is to be a nuisance.

The skink looks lost in thought, balancing accounts. It’s weighing up whether this meal is worth the effort. It’s possible that there’s more good meat on a blowfly. The smiling skink gives up, lets the cicada go.

Rejoicing at its second chance in life, the cicada spreads its wing and soars off, before coming to an ugly halt, crash-landing a few metres from where the skink still lays in wait. The cicada seems to have concussion. It squats, immobile as a stunned mullet. Its broad face its featureless; its eyes, set far apart (if it was a human face, it would be a hideous), seem glazed. The skink squints. It again considers eating the cicada. Too crunchy, it thinks.

Soon afterwards, I see a kookaburra, with a skink – like a piece of spaghetti – in its beak. But even in its wake, the dark liquid shapes emerge from crevices to bask, taking in all that sun. Summer belongs to skinks.

Written by Bert Spinks
Illustrations by Josh Pringle
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