You used to see them quite often in gardens: lizards warming themselves while bathing in the sun, sitting on a stone. Children and young people have often never seen a lizard before. In today's portrait we will introduce you to the nimble animals and show you how you can create a habitat for the reptiles in your garden.
How do I settle lizards in the garden?
To settle lizards in the garden, make it diverse and close to nature, offer retreats such as dry stone walls or piles of brushwood and optimal conditions for sunbathing on rock gardens or natural stone walls. Avoid using insecticides to preserve their natural food.
What native species of lizards are there?
With a bit of luck, one of these five lizard species can be found in the home garden:
- Wall Lizard
- Sand Lizard
- Emerald Lizard
- Forest Lizard
- Mountain Lizard
How do lizards live?
Lizards are reptiles and are cold-blooded animals. They cannot regulate their own temperature and need sunlight to warm themselves. This is the reason why you can often see the shy animals sunbathing.
Lizards lay eggs that are surrounded by a leathery shell. The female places them in a hole in the ground where they are incubated by the sun. With the forest lizard, however, this is a little different: Since it is adapted to a rather cool habitat, the egg shell bursts open when the eggs are laid and the already viable young animals hatch.
How can I make my garden lizard-friendly?
A diversely designed, not too tidy garden not only offers good living conditions for lizards. The shy reptiles find hedges and piles of brushwood as shelter here. Open and partly elevated areas such as a rock garden or a small natural stone wall offer the optimal conditions for sunbathing. Sparsely vegetated, loose soil is suitable for laying eggs.
Even if you don't see lizards that often, the animals are diurnal and quite local. Avoid using insecticides as spiders, beetles, snails and worms serve as food for reptiles.
Retreats in which the lizards can hide are of great importance. A dry stone wall that offers deep gaps is ideal. These can be made extremely attractive and well integrated into the look of the garden through attractive planting or transplanting.
Tip
Please do not capture lizards in the wild to settle in your own garden out of misunderstood love for animals. The local animals usually do not survive. If your garden is designed to be lizard-friendly, the reptiles will usually settle there on their own.
