bgrose, I am deleting the pics, so they should be gone in a few days. I thought if I showed you my cute lizard you would stop being afraid of them, but I can see my idea did not help at all. I have to say that I am glad that I have lizards, and we let the garden spider stay most of one summer so our ten year old could watch a spider spin its web, catch bugs, and then spin a cocoon and lay its eggs in the fall. We watched the baby spiders leave the next spring. I don't want her to be afraid of spiders and lizards or snakes, either, for that matter. I want her to know the dangers of some snakes and to appreciate the other critters for the jobs they play in the garden and in the soil. I am sorry you have such a deep fear of these animals and hope that you have success in removing your lizard, if that will help you. Sincerely, Gean

Kristy,so sorry about Waldo,you do get attached to your little critters,the little lizard is one of Freds babies. Shawn the yellow/orange one is CG,it has turned out to be one of my favorites,this is my first year with that one. TG the blue bird is a blue bunting,he is on my back deck right outside my glass door,I just used the zoom and got him,but they are so used to us being there they arn't afraid.The red flowers is a Cypress Vine,Theresa sent me the seeds during the winter,I love the vine and the hummingbirds do to. GG I should have cuttings of either CG or my noid orange this fall,just let me know if you want some when I cut them back. My FP is blooming now I will try to get pics this evening.

Excellent pics! The ones here move so fast, I haven't gotten a decent pic yet. Aren't they cool?! Until last summer, I never even heard of skinks and it took a few days and some help from these forums to figure out what it was. I thought it was a baby snake the first time I saw one. So glad to find out it's just a cute, harmless skink. This page at Univ of IL (in the "found near buildings" section) has great pics of 5-lined and broad-headed skinks, which don't look like yours, but doesn't mention blue tail skink. The 5th paragraph on this page describes a skink with a red head like that, blue tail skink. Matching description to the page, yours is probably a mature male. That's what I think yours is, a blue tail. Google images of blue tail skink.

So let me get this straight: your vet says that the cat "must have eaten a skink". In other words, no one actually SAW the cat eat anything, let alone a completely harmless lizard. The vet is making an assumption, in that case, NOT a real diagnoses. Vets are doctors. They make mistakes, and in some cases, they make guesses when they don't know what has happened. Skinks are harmless; they are not toxic in way, shape or form. Your cat's symptoms are consistent with an organophospate poison, something I've seen myself many times, since I live in an agricultural area where these chemicals are common, and commonly misused to kill animals, unfortunately. People still put out a deadly organophosphate called Temick, even though it's been banned, to kill animals, and all a cat has to do is walk across it and lick its feet. Eating a lizard will make a cat throw up, often, since scales are irritating to the esophagus(all the more reasons to keep cats indoors), but no lizard in North America is "poisonous", that is, toxic if ingested. YOU might not have used the product, but that doesn't mean that someone in your neighborhood didn't, and having seen Temick poisoning first-hand, the symtoms that your cat displayed are typical. I'm sorry about your cat, but I know a lot more about reptiles than your vet does, and he is wrong to blame a harmless lizard.