scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

23.9.04

for the people that don't live in texas, when i say house gecko, i mean ... i can't find any pictures of them: i do not mean the texas banded gecko (Coleonyx brevis) - we don't see those at all; ours aren't anywhere near that stripey, ours are fatter, and i think ours get bigger. i also do not mean the mediterranean gecko (Hemidactylus turcicus) which has apparently gotten loose all over the state (not that anybody minds, yet) as our geckos are not that bumpity. i also do not mean the house gecko (Hemidactylus frenatus) that has a more widely circulated name than "liz's immediate vicinity" as they appear, from the only picture i found, to be spot-free, and also i think they're tropical islandy. but here are some baby gecko pictures. they start out small and pinkily translucent and maybe an inch long, or an inch and a half, including the handily detatchable tails, and get larger and browner and spotty up to probably 5 or 6 inches or even longer, including the handily detatchable tails (of various lengths, depending on how long it's been since they've been detatched). i'm aware that i'm not supposed to get reticulated geckoes (Coleonyx reticulatus) in my part of texas but dammit that's what they look like. Only fatter. and i would be okay with calling them Texas banded geckos if they were just a little stripey. But they're not.

and when i say lizard, i mean this. green anoles have the ability to turn either green or brown, move very quickly, jump, and make big pink stretchy-things on their necks - this page has a picture of the pink stretchy. (i don't have any idea how the author of that page can actually tell apart the anoles that live in her yard.) apparently they change colors in part because of heat, which is why the ones on the brown, brown, brown, warm deck are always green.

Anyway. it's gecko season. there are 6 or 7 of them - the big full-grown ones - every time one opens the front door after dark; they're on the windows, on the deck, on the doghouse, on the back door, in the garage, ... if reticulated geckoes are really what i have, they're so not endangered (or anyway "threatened") any more. Especially because one accidentally squishes them sometimes (notably the one that was mistaking itself for a nice rubbery handle on a paint-can, and then slippered away, perfectly fine after being a nice soft handle), and when the baby ones get in they almost invariably die and you can't feel bad about it because there are so many.

Labels: texas

scrawled @ 20:02