Backyard and Beyond

A 73-degree November day early this month kept the lizards slithery.

Have we seen the last of them until the spring?

I saw my first years ago in a Queens cemetery where Harry Houdini is supposedly buried. (Well, he got out of a lot of things, right?)

Podarcis siculus. iNaturalist’s lizard crew marks them as the subspecies campestris, Northern Italian Wall Lizard, offshoots of the pet trade.
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Speaking of the pet trade: flea treatments for dogs and cats are poisoning the UK’s waters, threatening other insects, and fish, and so on down the line. People evidently apply these pesticides prophylactically, even with no evidence of infestation. I imagine the same here, where pet ownership has skyrocketed in recent decades and dogs, particularly, have been transformed into members of the family, with all the rights they’re entitled to against the planet’s unvoiced claims.