It asks iNaturalist which lizards have been recorded near you in the last 20 years and sorts them by how often they turn up, so the top of the list is your best bet. Choose in daylight and you get the baskers — skinks and green geckos — plus the night geckos you can realistically turn up under a rock. Choose after dark and you get the geckos that only come out once the torch is needed.
Geckos, skinks and tuatara — and snakes, in the sense that New Zealand has none on land. What it gets is the occasional sea snake carried down on a warm current and washed ashore: eleven records in the whole country. They are in here, and they are highly venomous, so the card says so. Marine turtles are filtered out, being neither.
This is the important thing to understand about lizard records. Many of them have a deliberately falsified location. Conservation agencies and iNaturalist obscure threatened species, and some — green geckos in New Zealand, for instance — are poached for the overseas pet trade. Their published position is shifted randomly by up to about 25 kilometres.
In New Zealand that covers more than half of all reptile records: around 8,600 of 16,000. Near Wellington, 18 of the 20 species you would be shown are there because of an obscured record. So a tight search would be theatre — it would look precise and be wrong.
20 km is the floor. At 50 km and above, the displacement always lands inside the search, so nothing goes missing. Below that, the app quietly sweeps out to 50 km for the protected records and adds back anything the tight search would have lost. Either way, read this as lizards living around here, not lizards at your feet. That is all the data can support, and it is the right answer anyway — many of these are protected, and several are poaching targets.
New Zealand has no land snakes; most of the world does. Where the app finds one it says so, and where that snake belongs to a family that is venomous throughout — the elapids, the vipers, the burrowing asps — the card carries a warning. A few dangerous rear-fanged colubrids are named individually, since their family as a whole is harmless.
This is read off the family in iNaturalist's own taxonomy rather than a hand-written list of species, because a list would be enormous and, far worse, quietly incomplete. Any other snake still gets a milder note. Nothing here is an identification: do not handle a snake on the strength of an app.
New Zealand's herpetofauna divides along genus lines almost perfectly, so this is a short hand-checked table rather than a guess: skinks and green geckos by day, every other gecko by night, with tuatara emerging at dusk.
Nocturnal geckos still appear in the daytime list, because turning rocks and lifting bark is how most of them are actually found. That distinction is why the timing is not simply read off the observation timestamps: tested against five species, nocturnal geckos returned only 17–22% night-time observations against 4–13% for diurnal ones. The timestamp records how people survey, not when the animal is awake.
Photographs come from iNaturalist and are shown only where the photographer has applied a Creative Commons licence. Each one is credited, and tapping any photo opens it large.
Finding a usable one takes three goes. A species' headline photo is often all rights reserved, so the app then checks the taxon's photo gallery, and if that is also restricted — or holds a single image, as happens more than you would think — it searches the observations themselves filtered by licence. A blank tile means all three came up empty, which is now rare.
Your position never leaves your device un-rounded — it is snapped to roughly 100 m before any search is sent, which makes no difference across a 50 km radius. It is not stored, and it never appears in the address bar, so nothing can pick it up from there either.
The dashed circle is the search area. Tap to move it.
Most geckos only come out after dark.
20 km is the minimum. Protected records are displaced by up to about 25 km, so below 50 km the app sweeps wider to catch them and flags what it finds. The About page explains.
