When taking watermelon rinds out to the compost bin last evening, I opened the lid to find a five-lined skink (also known as a blue-tailed skink) scurrying across the vegetative debris. A dedicated insectivore, he was surely taking advantage of the fact that numerous insects and spiders are drawn to the bin's rotting contents.
In a way, we are facilitating his hunting activity, just as bird feeding concentrates prey for a number of falcons, hawks and other predators. Are we thereby creating an imbalance in our backyard ecosystem or does the value of a compost bin outweigh the impact on our resident invertebrates? Should I screen in the compost to keep out predators?
This argument is partly in jest but also reminds us that most human activity, however well-intentioned, has an impact on natural ecosystems. Our species broke from those ecosystems once we developed the means to avoid being prey ourselves. For now, with all due respect to the spiders and insects, I will not evict the skink from our compost bin.
