Living with Lizards

Amazing little creatures that bring joy to our lives

Aloha and welcome to my newsletter, a guest post by my adorable wife, Dorothy. She’s had a lifelong love of nature with lizards occupying a special place. In Kaua’i, lizards are everywhere, outdoors and in. Read on. You may be captivated by them, too.

Some lizards like brown anoles do, indeed, love living among the greenery, but geckos are a different story.

Kaua’i is lizard heaven--warm but not blistering hot nor colder than 60˚F, and nicely (for lizards) humid. You’d think they would be happy with living outdoors where there’s greenery and lots of small insects to chow down on. But not necessarily so.

There are basically two types of geckos here—green ones that are active in the daytime, generallly outside, and a few species of basically brown ones that venture out after sunset.

Here’s a green gecko, about 4 inches long, licking a small piece of fresh pineapple. They love fruit! Dorothy checks our narrow balcony often to make sure fruit is available to a gecko that wanders by

Once we moved into our apartment, we quickly learned that condos and geckos are natural companions. Just find a place to hide, come out after the lights are out, help keep down the indoor ant and cockroach populations and be safe from predators—lizard researchers even refer to their subjects as “nature’s lunchbox.”

Here’s Cracker Jack, a gecko that showed up one night while we were watching TV. Safely out of harm’s way on a supporting beam, we watched him slowly investigate his territory for a potential meal. When we looked again a few minutes later, he had vanished.

As we were moving in, we’d stashed our empty suitcases under a countertop in the kitchen. When I moved one piece, the tiniest possible brown gecko appeared on the floor—oh, it’s so cute I exclaimed. But when I reached down to catch it— poof! It zipped into a crack and was gone. But I was entranced.

The next encounter was quite different. Our refrigerator has a separate freezer compartment atop the cold space.  One day I swung open the freezer door and was horrified to see a mangled-looking brown gecko twitching on the edge between the two sections.

I yelled to Greg, saying I’d killed a gecko by mistake! I was very distraught. It looked like I’d partly cut off its head but it was still twitching. Yuck! Greg touched it to turn it over and then I could see that it wasn’t a wounded neck at all, it was the tail that was gooey and detached and the gecko’s legs were flailing.  Greg picked it up carefully and I realized I’d been fooled by an ancient lizard trick—sacrifice your tail to distract an enemy and you can live on to grow a new tail.

Doubting it could survive since he might have other injuries, we opened the sliding door and laid it gently on the narrow balcony, hoping it could somehow make it. In the morning, he wasn’t there. A good sign. Maybe.

Learning to live with in-home wildlife can be interesting. When I find an indoor gecko I name it. “The Count” hid under the toaster on the kitchen counter. Once when I scared him he scrambled out where the edge of the counter meets the wall. There he lay still, except he waved and wriggled the end of his tail. Aha! I realized he was doing the “bite my tail, it’s really my head” routine to lure a predator away from his body. I left quietly to get my camera to catch the action but when I got back in just a minute or two he was gone.

“Wally” would appear seemingly out of nowhere and climb around on the wall behind the TV. One morning as I fetched fruit from a bowl I felt a funny squiggly feeling on my hand and pulled away, only to find Wally climbing up my arm. I shook him off and he scurried away along the floor and disappeared. I then knew to look for him before grabbing fruit.

Here’s Wally, hiding under some ginger.

A gecko Dorothy named Dori on our front door next to a hinge. She’s tiny, only about 2 inches long

Now and then a baby shows up out of nowhere on the screen window. I’m in awe of how the beautiful pattern of browns appears in tiny replicas on their bodies. We wish them well as they begin their perilous lives.

Baby Gecko.

Survival may be difficult in the lizard world, but it can happen.  We’d released the injured brown gecko outside onto our narrow balcony, which is actually the realm of the green day geckos. We’d forgotten about him as we imagined he really didn’t have much of a chance to survive. Then one day after two days of almost constant rain, as I admired the sunlight shining on the balcony, a beautiful brown indoor-nighttime lizard emerged from the crack under the sliding door and began to lick up ants on a bit of pineapple we’d left out for the green geckos. And here he is.

What’s a nighttime gecko doing here in the bright sunlight, I wondered.  Then I looked more closely and saw that this fellow had a new piece of tail, and he appeared right in the area where we’d placed the injured gecko weeks before.  I immediately dubbed him Lazarus, since he appeared to have arisen from near death. The sunshine brought out his colors as he fed on the balcony, and I admired him for his beauty and determination to survive.

Greg had his own special encounter with a gecko. He named him Hitch. Returning to the car after a root canal procedure, Greg opened the car door, slid onto the driver’s seat, and just as he reached for the door handle, this is what he saw:

The gecko Hitch. Hope you’re all right wherever you are.

A small gecko that looked like he’d discovered a new home. While waiting for the gecko to make up its mind and leave, Greg took photos and made a video of the gecko. After a few minutes, Hitch crawled away and disappeared. But where did he go?

Some people don’t like sharing their homes with geckos, but we enjoy their company, as do many other folks. One fellow we are told has taught a gecko to sip wine from his glass! That’s going a bit far, but it’s good to know that ‘our’ geckos aren’t the only welcomed ones.

Postscript: During the past five years, Dorothy has worked with many lizard scientists in the field to research her new book on lizard evolution in the Caribbean, “The Lizard Scientists” (Clarion Books, 2022). Here’s a review:

The Horn Book (Jan/Feb 2023):

 Patent interviews the scientists in a variety of research settings and explains, in easily understandable and scientifically robust detail, their research questions and methods and the contributions they make to our understandings of evolution and natural selection...... High-quality photographs of anoles and their habitats, taken by lizard scientists turned documentary filmmakers, are well aligned with the text and provide details that readers can scrutinize.

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