Lizard!

What a hot, humid day! By 7:15 this morning it was 90 degrees on the back porch and surely must have been pushing 90% humidity. Perfect weather for our various buggy friends.

But…heh heh! The Funny Farm has a better friend: a cute little baby lizard.

Actually, by now he’s more of an adolescent lizard. He’s been living in the back bathroom and bedroom for several weeks now. At first he was a tiny little guy, so new and delicate his skin was pink where you could see the blood through it. He’s still only an inch or so long, but he is beginning to look more like he’s going to live to see old age.

And we haven’t spotted a mosquito around in…well! Several weeks now.

Because his tiny snowshoe-like feet cling to the wall like suction cups, he can race along a vertical surface so fast he turns into a blur. One of the favored vertical surfaces is one also favored by resident mosquitoes.

More to the point than mosquitoes, though, are the crickets.

A couple of weeks ago, a tribe of the little guys encamped — or maybe hatched — in the family room. That they eat binding glue out of the books and consume fabric off the floor pillows would annoy one enough, even without the cricket love songs. But their night-time mating arias pose a more immediate problem.

One of the desert Romeos started up in there about a week ago. This was OK — closing the bedroom door allowed for a decent night’s sleep.

Then he moved up the hall to one of the nearby rooms. When I shut the door on him that night, he came in through the crack beneath it and made himself to home in the bedroom curtains!

Well, the particular variety of cricket that lives in these parts has learned to shut up and hide the instant a human heaves into view. That makes it mighty hard to find and smush the little fiddlers. And whereas Cassie the Corgi shares many personality characteristics with cats, chasing down small insects is not one of them. So I went to sleep with a pillow over my head.

Next morning, come the usual wee-hours call to awaking: Silence.

No cricket song.

I figured he must have found a girlfriend and so was otherwise occupied. But that evening when bedtime rolled around, silence still graced the bedroom. Where was Jiminy Cricket?

He didn’t go out the sliding door. He didn’t hop out the bedroom door and back up the hall.

And the gecko? He seems to have put on an ounce or so.

It’s always good when you can see your gecko breathing…

😉

Images:

Juvenile Hemidactylus frenatus (a gecko). No photographer named. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
House gecko with a spider, Austin, Texas. Ehollins. Public domain.
Field cricket, Acheta domesticus. Luis Fernández García L. Fdez. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Spain license.

(As usual, click on an image for a higher-resolution view.)