Let's Have a Closer Look | Common Green Forest Lizard

It was a fully packed week, but my unstoppable eyes caught one of my favorite creatures. You may already know, I like birds a lot, and lizards and dragonflies. Sometimes unintentionally my eyes turn to them where ever they hide.

Today I am going to share with you about a lizard. Generally, there are two lizards in our garden. The first one is always brown, who lives on a mango tree. I haven't found him in other parts of the garden except in the front yard.

He is too shy and quickly moves away when I appear. I assume his name is "Oriental Garden Lizard". Anyway, ​I am not going to talk about him today. This story is about "the green" guy, who is known as a common forest green lizard and in our language it is පළා කටුස්සා.

This one lives everywhere. Even though the brown lizard is limited to his mango tree and the area around, the "Green Guy" lives everywhere in the garden. The best thing I like is his color transformation.

As you see, his color of face turns to red sometimes. There are two reasons for this color change.

1. Reacting to danger
   During a danger or hunting, green lizards pluff their throat and convert the skin around the throat to a red color.

2. During mating season
   This color helps male lizards to signal the opposite gender to a company with him.

With my personal experience, the Common garden lizard has a very beautiful greeny look when he is calm.

If you look at his throat, it is purely white. Think of his color transformation to red? They have pigmented cells called "chromatophore" , වර්ණධර to change the color of skin.

This light green look helps to stay protected from large birds who attempt to attack them. Even though the color of his through is white in the above picture, can you see it has turned to slight green in the below one.

_{Comapre colors of this one with the colors of the photo before this}

The color has changed to more green as his whole background is green.

Lizard's skin consists of scales (කොරල) as same as other reptiles. I could have a closer look to his foot, which is made to toughly hold the surface. Fingers are also covered with scales. Nature has featured them in various ways to survive.

Long and foldable fingers help to hold the surface. I guess these fingers will hurt humans if a lizard hangs on human body. If you count, there are 5 fingers in a hand as same as us.

There can be hundreds of incidents in nature that drop from your sight but you must see. Try to not to miss at least one of them next time :)

_{10% to sl-charity}