How to Get Rid of Skinks, and Why You Might Not Want To

Worth saying before the methods: skinks eat the insects you are already fighting, they do no damage, and in several places they are protected. The sensible goal is keeping them out of the house, not off the property.

What a skink actually is

• A lizard, smooth and glossy with short legs and a tapering body, often striped
• Diurnal — active in daylight, which is why you see them and rarely see geckos
• Insectivorous. Crickets, beetles, spiders, snails, slugs, grubs
• Harmless. Not venomous, not poisonous to touch, and the jaws of a garden species have trouble breaking skin
• A blue tail is a juvenile marking in several common species. It is a decoy — a predator strikes the bright tail, the skink sheds it and regrows a duller one

The four changes that work

1. Take away the cover

This is most of the result. Skinks need somewhere to hide between hunts and something flat to bask on.

• Log piles, stacked firewood and timber offcuts moved away from the house
• Flat stones, pavers and rubble lifted or relocated
• Leaf litter and deep mulch raked back from the foundation to leave a clear band
• Dense ground cover trimmed off the walls
• Pots, trays and tarpaulins stacked off the ground

2. Seal the house

An indoor skink came through a gap, and the gap is usually one of four.

1. Door thresholds. A worn sweep on a back or garage door is the single most common route
2. Vents, weep holes and utility penetrations — mesh them with fine wire, not foam
3. Window screens with tears, and frames that no longer sit square
4. The garage door seal, which perishes before anything else on the house

3. Cut the insect supply

Skinks follow food. A porch light running a white bulb all evening is a feeding station.

• Warm amber or yellow bulbs outdoors, which draw far fewer moths and beetles
• Lights off when nobody is out
• Sweep up spilled birdseed and fallen fruit, both of which breed insects
• Deal with a damp spot — a dripping tap, a saucer under a pot, a leaking hose fitting

Getting one out of the house

It is lost rather than settled, and it will dehydrate within days if left.

1. Open the nearest outside door wide and close the doors to the rest of the house
2. Shut the curtains on other windows, so the open door is the brightest way out
3. Herd gently with a broom, from well behind it. Do not corner it
4. Or catch it: a plastic container over the skink, a sheet of card slid underneath, carry it out. Release it in cover at the bottom of the garden, not on an open lawn
5. Never grab it by the tail. It will drop the tail, which is a real cost to the animal and leaves you holding a wriggling tail
6. Then find the gap it came through, or you will do this again next week

Why most of the advice online is wrong

The skink problem has an unusually large market of products that do nothing.

• Mothballs. No repellent effect on reptiles, and outdoor use is illegal in most jurisdictions because it is off-label use of a registered pesticide. The vapour is a hazard to people and pets in an enclosed space
• Sulphur granules and garlic sprays. No evidence
• Peppermint, cinnamon, coffee grounds, eggshells. No evidence
• Ultrasonic repellers. No evidence for any reptile
• Pesticide sprays aimed at the skink. Illegal for a non-target vertebrate in most places, and they poison the food chain

The one chemical approach with any logic behind it is treating the insects, because that removes the reason to be there. Even then, cover and gaps do more.

The case for leaving them

• They eat crickets, beetles, spiders, snails, slugs and grubs in volume
• They damage nothing — no burrowing, no chewing, no droppings problem
• They are not venomous and will not bite anyone
• They are food for birds and snakes, so a yard with skinks is a working one
• In several places they are protected, and numbers are falling in parts of their range

A skink in the garden is a sign the garden is functioning. The house is a separate question, and a door sweep solves it.