Saving Barney

January 13, 2012. There was great excitement at the Johnstone household this week when Barney the Savannah Monitor Lizard appeared on the scene … was lost … and then found again.

Savannah what? you might ask. Well we’ll get to that shortly, but first we need to head back to the start of this reptilian adventure story.

We had nipped up to White Mountain Lodge in the central Berg for a few days in December to get away from the big smoke and chill out before getting ready to face 2012. Being an obsessive braaier, I packed my nifty stainless steel braai in its cloth bag and we headed off (car weighed down with an obscene amount of clutter) for White Mountain. Short story long and all that, when we returned home and all the goodies were unpacked, we took out the braai (and, guess what, braaied again) and left the cloth bag lying on our porch next to a pile of wood.

Enter Barney. Or, enter Barney, exposed by the eagle eye of Roxy, the cross Staffie, Ridgeback, stoepkakker pavement all sorts, who doesn’t miss a trick, certainly not a 35cm long, plump lizard lurking underneath our braai’s cloth bag.

Poep-scared

So there we were, not quite sure what to do with this lizard-that-looked-like-a-dragon . . . In fact, I was poep-scared the thing was going to bite me. Its long, black tongue kept darting back and forth, no doubt trying to get a feel for who or what we were. So it was a classic stand-off … we didn’t know what to make of Barney, and Barney, I’m sure, was pretty scared of us.

Barney, exposed on our porch, and not too happy about it

Back to that short story thing: Eventually, after remaining oh-so-still for some time, Barney strolled off the porch and crept under the house. Luckily we’d snapped off a few pics because it slowly began to dawn on us – after doing some research – that this was not a local critter and was probably someone’s pet. The next day my mate Kyle (a boff on such matters) discovered this was a Savannah Monitor Lizard, that he was pretty rare in these parts and almost certainly someone’s pet “dog”.

Networking

This is when you might suspect that social media networks saved the day, with a flurry of networking to help find the pet’s owner, but you’d be wrong. Twitter and Facebook generated some interest but not the solution to our problem, instead it was good old face-to-face contact that won the day. My wife mentioned to a colleague at work – known to fancy animals of all sorts – that we had a lizard on the loose, and he informed the local lizard network, which promptly leaped into action.

After a few phone calls, Barney’s frantic owner, suspecting that the footloose reptile was his beloved pet who had escaped, got hold of us on the phone. A trap was set, and the hunt was on.

With the tempting lure of a bucket of chicken livers, sure enough Barney eventually came out of hiding and – after one more game of hide and seek – was apprehended, a tad thinner than before, but still in robust health. This time he gave Roxy a proper fright, and her tan behind was seen leaping about three metres into the air.

Our home, and indeed, the whole neighbourhood, seemed to celebrate a story that could have gone wrong, but turned out to be a happy omen for Barney and his owner, and perhaps a positive sign for a great 2012 ahead? Should we call it the year of the lucky lizard? – Garth Johnstone