Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Help save our lizards .... please

For the last 10 years since moving to VA, we have spent countless hours watching "our" lizards around the house. We started with 3 - now, we have a few dozens.

We have taken THOUSANDS of pictures of them.

We have built numerous stone castles and carefully positioned cinder blocks for their safety and comfort.

You can call them "run of the mill wild fence lizards" but they are our only pets and we care very much for them (right - we do not have children ).

We are now faced with a serious problem:

We need to kill off the vegetation growing on our crushed stone drive and parking area. Besides our lizards, we also find rabbits and birds foraging on the crushed stone, more or less constantly.
We like them all , and don't want to poison them.

But the greenery has got to go.

Will Round-up do them any harm? Is there something else we could use?
We have a small flame thrower, but there's too much surface to cover. I think a herbicide is ultimately the solution.

Please: help save "our babies".

chemicals never seem to do the trick anyways...

Thanks. I did not think about it. Do you want to give me a hand ?

I forgot to say that we have about one thousand feet of driveway from the main road, plus about 200' around our building.

We are away from home (for business) from June till September.
When we come back, we cannot find the road. Grasses grow about 4' high.

We end up weed whacking the road - which is not too safe for us, our vehicles and building (flying stones).

We watched once a young lizard running ahead of the weed whacker .... not to get away, but to catch the bugs it disturbed.

We tried the propane torch trick. We bought the expensive official "flame thrower": it does not seem to work that great either.

I happen to be in the lawn care industry. I've used Roundup around lizards alot, including my own house. I'm here in Florida and we have 100's of Anoles running around our yard. I've never seen a sick one, even after applying insectacide. As for Roundup, it is absorbed into the leaves and dries pretty quick. As long as you don't spray it on the lizards themselves, it really should be ok. You'll have to be scaring them away ahead of the sprayer. Everybody gives Roundup a bad rap. I'm the one who actually uses it and I've never seen any problems. By the way, for a more natural weed preventative, you can actually use salt. For a driveway that big, we're talking about alot of salt. But, that's one of the way's people do that sort of thing. Check into that too. Hope this helps.

Mike

"I hope this helps"

You bet this helps !!!...

thanks a lot. You finally put our mind to rest.

Scaring away some of them is not always that easy as they are used to us.

When we changed a tire on our camper - we moved the "resident" lizard away from under the wheel - several times.
He was coming back where he belonged - while we were using jacks, compressor, ...etc.....

We won't spray them.

Thanks a lot.

if you could put several layers or 1 really thick weedguard under the rocks, there would be nay more weeds. It would be a ton of work, but after that, they're GONE. You just can't put too many rocks over it or the weeds will grow in that too.. You need deer lol.
-----
Paullywog

If it has scales or smooth wet skin... snatch it!!!