Two days ago, I noticed a tiny gecko crawling up the wall next to my bed. I promptly got a glass from my kitchen, carefully corraled the wee beasty and gently set him on a hibiscus bush in my yard.
He wasn't more than two inches long. As he plopped down onto a leaf, he flickered his tongue in the air, sampling his new environment. I left him there, and I felt the sort of satisfaction you get from doing the right thing.
Last Friday morning I flew out of West Palm Beach airport to Birmingham, Alabama, to attend Murder in the Magic City. When I turned my phone back on after the flight, my contractor and friend Yvonne had sent me this terse message:
Ur bedroom wallplate is full of eggs.
And the photo above.
See, I had asked her to remove some old wallplates that covered junctions for phone hookups. She did, and that's what she found.
Ugh.
I called her promptly. Yvonne said, and I quote, "The exterminator was here and he has NO idea what kind of eggs those are."
Well, I do. They are gecko eggs. I looked them up on my Blackberry. I'm pretty positive that the little guy I rescued was part of a big family. So I instructed Yvonne to put all the eggs in a plastic tub I had fitted with a piece of screen mesh.
I'll let you know when/if they hatch. Meanwhile, while I was more than pleased to rescue ONE gecko. I'm certainly happy I won't wake up to an entire army of them marching over my face!
Ugh, ugh, and double ugh!
9 comments:
My kudos to you, Joanna, for saving that gecko and preserving its eggs--in a nonthreatening place!
Yes, good for you for trying to preserve the eggs. When (if) they hatch, maybe as a reward they can get you a special deal on your car insurance! (I'm feeling a trifle silly today.)
Linda, I love the line from Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinan Rawlings about how the land belongs to the birds and the animals and the trees, not to us. I'm the transient here.
Monica, I'll be sure to ask my hatchlings for the "good sport" discount!
Good to try and save them, but that is still just totally creepy!
Good luck. I hope you hatch something :-) Geckos are the one “pest” I never minded when living in the tropics. There was one that seemed to wait for me every morning in the shower. But the eggs we found never hatched. Oh, none ever crawled over my face, but they all ate the bugs that annoyed us. In fact, we spent many evenings just watching the geckos cling to the window screens and hunting down bugs. I have fond memories of those critters.
I hope the eggs hatch and you tell us all about it. We had a lizard loose in our house for a week. The cat had brought it in. It was a big thrill to finally get it back to the backyard.
Betty, I'm worried that it got too cold for them. I was looking at the temp requirements and remember that cold snap here? I guess we'll see.
NL, they are fascinating critters, aren't they? I also saw a green American anole today. They've almost been extinguished by the non-native, invasive Cuban brown anoles, so I was really thrilled to see a bright green fellow running in my hibiscus.
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