Gecko Corner

This is Gecko Corner, just above the righthand side of my Siargao Island 'home office' at about 7 pm. All of the extended family are out there, and they're patrolling the best bits for tasty insect nibbles.

Actually, there are half a dozen more, to the left side, but they all maintain very careful territories. Sometimes, there's a little bit of a flurry, with a gecko growl and a scuffle; they are quarrelling about sex or territory rights, both of which seem to be prevalent problems amongst most animal groups.

Geckos have evolved amazing abilities for holding onto vertical and even sub-horizontal surfaces. They can stick to anything...sometimes. See: Gecko's amazing sticky feet

and when that doesn't work, they can turn around, mid-air, to make sure they land properly:

See:
Tail 'key' for gecko acrobatics

They are all around my house; and are fairly ambitious.


Sometimes they fall off the ceiling.

When they land, stunned for a moment, you can see the thought, in their eyes 'Where the f*** am I now?'

This one plopped onto my computer keyboard.

Other stuff drops into my evening drink occasionally.

Some mornings I find some poor soused gecko in the glass I left on the table.


This little fellow is trying to eat a moth more than half his body size (excluding head and tail).

He can't bite the insect in half; he'll just have to do the best he can to swallow it whole.



Very occasionally, the geckos stop fighting each other, and have some fun.

I'm going to be very careful about this, because Google might put me on the pornography blacklist if I publish this photo.


But look at their eyes; neither look exactly ecstatic; much like humans, really.

My apologies for the f***ed up layout of this post (and others). Google's Blogger has been giving me much angst today.

Them green lizards

We have a couple of 'daily lizards' around the place.

There are the always-present geckos. As I sit at my worktable in the evening, I can count around a dozen on the walls and ceiling around me.

They chatter, attack and rape each other, and are altogether a very useful digression from the problems of thinking and writing.

But we also have another lizard. The Emerald Green Skink - Lamproletis smaragdinus.

I featured them here. They are very beautiful; one of those things that you see occasionally, that give you immediate pleasure, just from their appearance - a bit like a bunch of silent hot air balloons crossing the escarpment in front of you, as they used to do, over the Chiltern Hills, when I lived in Tring, Hertfordshire. It's only when they pass directly overhead, and fart, as they boost the hot air, that you realise they are not disembodied spirits, but have bodily functions as well.

So when I saw one of my Emerald Lizards chomping a gecko, I was a little disappointed that he had very definite bodily functions, as well.