Common wall lizards Podarcis muralis at a new site in England registered by a citizen science reporting tool

Abstract

T common wall lizard Podarcis muralis Laurenti, 1768, is a small lizard species that is widely distributed across southern and western Europe (Böhme et al., 2009). It has colonised areas outside this native range successfully, including Britain, where the Wall Lizard Project estimates 20,500 animals to be living (Langham, 2019). Here, we report an observation of P. muralis at Faversham, a town in south-east England. This has been identified from a sighting submitted to Froglife’s Dragon Finder App, a free digital recording tool that was developed with the aim of increasing recording of amphibians and reptiles by members of the public in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The wall lizard sighting was submitted to a Microsoft Access database through the Dragon Finder App on 9 April 2022, as a photo of a pair of lizards basking on a brick wall (Fig. 1). These were reported using the species selection tool built into the app as viviparous lizards Zootoca vivipara. However, during verification by trained Froglife staff members and volunteers (using photos and distributional records), the two lizards were identified as P. muralis, probably an adult male and female. Through information accompanying the submission, we learned that the sighting was from a private garden of a property built three years earlier. From the location of the sighting and follow-up correspondence with the app user, it was inferred that the house is part of a larger residential development, bordered by mixed land uses (improved grassland, built-up areas and arable fields) (Kent Habitat Survey, 2012). The approximate location of the sighting was 51.309° N, 0.88° E (Fig. 2). In further correspondence with the app user, we received photographs taken in spring 2020 of a juvenile P. muralis basking on the same brick wall (Fig. 3). The user had observed lizards basking on the garden walls, believed to be the same population of P. muralis, regularly in the spring and summer since 2020. The only other verified reports of P. muralis in the Faversham area come from the nearby site of Ospringe Church (location: 51.30684° N, 0.86835° E), first recorded and verified by Kent Reptile and Amphibian Group in July 2020. At the time of writing, the origin of this population had not been identified. This population is located <1 km south-west of the Faversham sighting, separated mostly by a mixture of arable fields and improved grassland (Kent Habitat Survey, 2012). Williams (2019) notes that introduced P. muralis populations in Britain display a preference for dense and scattered scrub, bare ground, introduced and dry dwarf shrub and hard cliff, but also favour anthropogenic features including roads, rail tracks, quarries and residential gardens. In fact, Williams (2019) found a lower probability of occurrence at increased distances from roads, rail tracks The Herpetological Bulletin 163, 2023: 39–40