Wednesday 8 May 2013

Buried Treasure..

Digging in the border yesterday I came upon these eggs buried just beneath the soil surface.

Remembering Tim's advice, I went for a coin to give an idea of scale..

We thought they might be lizard eggs and Colin's search on the internet confirmed this. In fact the picture he found had also used the one centime coin for scale!

There are lizards all over the garden (and the house) in the spring and summer

And sometimes we find them in the most unexpected places, like the top of the curtains in the living room...

I covered over the eggs with soil again and can only hope I hadn't disturbed them too much.

5 comments:

Tim said...

Sorry folks, those are not likely to be lizard eggs.... lizard eggs are about half the size of that one Eurocent coin... or a bit larger... and are laid in groups of no more than eight to ten at a time.

These look much more like snail or slug eggs to me... the large black or brown Arion species come to mind.

It is difficult to tell from these photos... were they glossy?

Tim said...

This is the link you need for common Wall Lizard egg size... and note the shape... oval.
http://www.euroherp.com/species/Podarcis_muralis/?photo=eggs

And for slug eggs:
http://www.meades.org/photos_from_the_garden/slug_eggs.jpg

Rhodesia said...

The last eggs I came up with similar to that turned out to be newt eggs! Surprising as we have no water around here. Have a good day. Diane

Jean said...

I found similar eggs in a pot when I was turning out old compost. As we definitely do not get lizards here I decided they were slug eggs so flushed them down the drain!

Colin and Elizabeth said...

Thanks. Sometimes we do get it wrong!!