A Spanish tourist living in Badajoz got a fright when she arrived home last Monday and opened her suitcase after a holiday in Madeira. In her luggage she found an unwanted ‘gift’: a lizard, about 30 centimetres long. As it is not common in that region of Spain, the alarmed woman called the emergency line of the Rexcate wildlife centre. The story was reported yesterday by the newspaper La Crónica de Badajoz.
Biologist Gonzalo Albarrán, director of the Rexcate centre, explained that the first thing the technicians asked the woman for was a photograph of the small reptile (see image accompanying this news story). They immediately realised that it was a lizard, a species endemic to Madeira, and informed the tourist that it posed no danger.
Even so, wildlife experts offered to go to the lady’s house to collect the specimen. It turns out that, when they arrived at the location, the lizard had already died, apparently due to the stress of the trip and being out of its natural habitat.
According to the news, if the small reptile had survived, technicians would have had to contact the Regional Government of Extremadura and coordinate with a Portuguese wildlife centre a transfer process, in order to place the animal in a programme for reintroduction into the wild. This avoided a lot of hassle, but it was still a scare, and sad end for the lizard.