shedding skin

As well as The Summer of the Baby Bluebirds, it's been The Summer of the Mutilated Lizard. I came back from my alt pro photo course one day to find Alice understandably extremely upset: she'd managed inadvertently to shut the rear end of a lizard in a window she was closing (as the cleaner-up of this tragedy, I can vouch for the unpleasant bloody mess left by a squashed tail). But said Lizard did scuttle off, and ever since then we've been looking, hopefully, for lizards with exceptionally short tails, or regrown bits of stumpy cartilage. And there's been certainly one good candidate, with no new tail markings on his stump.

Then today, this monster appeared. From a distance, it looked like a horrifically mutilated lizard (not least because when first spotted, it was munching on a red and white butterfly). But closer inspection - and, in particular, taking this photo, and blowing up the image - I advise clicking on it and looking at the detail - shows that what's going on is a change of skin. S/he's shedding that dry, papery outer carapace, and underneath is a sleek new shiny set of scales. Here, it looks very much as though the Lizard has attempted dressing in drag for the day, and has completely failed to carry it off.