John Hildebrand, Age 14, Of Winnipeg, Man., Canada, for his question:
What is a skink?
When you find a lizard, chances are he is a skink. For skinks make up one quarter of all the lizards in the world. You will find the graceful little fellow among the rocks or soil, for he is a ground lizard. He is busiest during the summer days, and in cold regions he hibernates through the winter.
These are about 20 different skinks in North America. They are small. Lizards, and in the warm summer days we can find them almost everywhere. The big ones often measure 11 inches, but more than half of this length is tail. There are many smaller skinks just a few inches long.
You can tell almost at a glance whether a lizard happens to be a skink. His body is covered with smooth, flat scales which give his coat a silky sheen. He has stumpy, lizard type legs placed along his sides and, as a rule, is able to run faster than his lizard cousins. He can scoot over the ground and out of reach among the rocks before you can grab him.
He can also scoot fast enough to catch himself a dinner of grasshopper meat, or he may shop for a leisurely dinner of ant larvae or beetle grubs. He likes warm, moist places and most likely can be found hiding on a rocky ledge or under a log. He may burrow in the soil, and when the cold weather comes, he is surf to pass the time in the deep s1eep of hibernation.
The lizards are noted for being very poor parents and careless about bringing up their young. The mother lizard usually lays her eggs and leaves them. The skink is an exception. In some cases, the eggs stay inside the mother's body until the young are ready to emerge.
The common skink is smallish and brown, merging to blue toward the end of the tapering tail. The mother lays her clutch of large, white eggs in early summer. She places them in a burrow or perhaps in a rocky crevice, and then her long wait begins. The little mama skink curls around, brooding on her eggs for perhaps six weeks.
The youngsters are about one inch long and all ready to face the world. Off they scuttle, knowing ,just where to look for the mealy bugs and other beetles they need t0 eat. The speedy little fellows also know just how to catch themse1ves a tasty dinner.
Many skinks have light and darker stripes running down their backs from head to tail. There are skinks with five or eight lines, but most of them have five. There are sandy colored sand skinks in sandy places, and the great western skink is a dragon green fellow with red spots on his nose. All of these pretty lizards are satin smooth, and all of them have forked tongues to aid their sense of smell.