Here Be Dragons!!

well, the green dragon looks great :)

Is he a real dragon in your garden Nariz..?....and the welsh one is very pretty

Yes, Pam, George is real AND in my garden (see Blog 'A Visitor To My Garden) although he's obviously not a REAL dragon! He's an Oscellated Lizard and lives in the dry stone wall by the meadow over the garden and can sometimes be seen lazing in the sun in the drainage outlet from the meadow. We also caught him having a paddle in the bird bath the other day! Cheeky!

Wow....2 lovely dragons there Nariz. Personally I love the George - he is gorgeous. Do you call him Gorgeous George?

You are so lucky to have seen 'George' so closely. Isn't it wonderful to have wild life on our doorstep?
The fuchsia is beautiful. Is it tender or hardy?

Gosh It's got buds ! That's wonderful ...
Nice to see George is still with you too :o)

What a splendid fellow. You're a lucky and very privileged lady!

Don't you have resident lizards, Gattina? Or do your army of cats deplete them before they become apparent?

Our cats live for lizard-chasing, so ours never get above the tiny stage. They tend to be small, brownish and half-eaten. Not very attractive!

The reptiles always seem to be dragons.......or dinosaurs......in miniature

I think they are so beautiful - almost jewel-like if you look closely.

They are Gattina, where we went recently for some more fish had reptiles in a special area and even though the guy knew I wasn't buying he showed me the little chamaeleon wo was so cute but the sand lizards were spookyabout half a dozen sitting on a rock and blended in so well and kept so still that I missed them the first timd, until their eyes moved in unison

The photos of George are very good! That camera handles close-ups very well! I remember very well the Lizards I often watched in Cuenca, they move so fast they are gone in the blink of an eye - quite literally!

Love the lizard ; did someone mention Gorgeous George ?

lovely addition to your garden, how big is it say compared to the french wall lizard?

Three times as long and four times as meaty, Resi!

impressive beast
can you send one across please Nariz?

Hm! How to catch a lizard? How to package a lizard? How to post a lizard? I think you'll just have to be content with my pictures of them Resi! :o)

ohh all right then :-((

Oh, Nariz, you do make life more difficult than necessary: You promise it marmite sandwiches, then when it pauses to lick it's lips and think about whether it loves or hates marmite, you whisk an address label round its neck and push it onto a plane..........

are you in the queue for one as well Gattina? they seem a lot easier to have around than your porcupines. dont bother to tempt THEM w marmite sarnies, they wld get returned to sender tout suite or pronto or whatever.
do i feel a mickey somewhere in there.... ;~))

Not if I didn't put a return address label on 'em. Hah! Didn't think of THAT one, did you? Mickey? What Mickey?

hmm with just an address label round its neck your postie isnt gone like you alot, not even if you wrap his feet in wet newspaper, the porccupine not the postie!

The whole idea, I think, would be that Poste Italiane just might lose him....(and I don't mean the postie - who is a rather pretty lady, by the way)

i should think they wld lose him pretty quickly, before he got anywhere in la france, i wonder if they occur here? must do some googling

There are two kind of porcupines found here, the small local variety, not often seen, and the much, much bigger, destructive ones which were imports from Africa many, many, many years ago. Apparently they make good eating, so I doubt many will have made it as far as France! ;o)

no cannt find them here, i am surprised though, anything that moves, can be shot and eaten get the vote here.

Well, that's it, then - you've single-handedly exterminated them. Did they taste good?

the so and so's, they never let me even get a taste of one. must be one of this nations best kept secrets, extermination of italian porcupines!
what keeps them in tuscany though...is it the climate or are they culled? and do they feature on the menu in your part of the country?

For starters, Resi, we don't live in Tuscany! We're in Emilia Romagna, to the north. I'm not sure about the rest of Italy, but it wouldn't surprise me to find they are all over the place - they are a cause of much shouting and swearing among the farming population, and since this is a major area of potato production, their depredations are a serious problem. I googled "porcupines and how to get rid of them" in Italian and the hundreds of webpages devoted to it was astounding, so I guess it's pretty widespread. I have absolutely no doubt that in the terrible "anni poveri" after the two world wars, porcupines would have featured on the menu, along with every other crawling or flying creature, but, (hard to believe) they are now a protected species, so if they are killed, it's done in secret. We find the bodies of badgers by the roadside (who knows if they have been hit by cars) but we've never seen porcupine corpses (except last year, after the deep, deep snow melted and there was a huge and elderly spiny corpse in the field below one of the cowsheds) so a casserole of "istrici" may still not be unknown! Who knows!

sorry Gattina, when i googled them in dutch, dont run to italian! only tuscany came up, so i assumed!
they really have reached pest proportions by the sound of it. knotty problem since they are on the protected species list, must be a source of an awful lot of frustration and hardship possibly.

Which our canny locals, like all good Italians, cope with by completely ignoring the law. (I was going to say "Good thing, too", but thought better of it).

;~))