Geckos all around

Having made our homes with planted areas, small or large, around us, we have found ourselves being hosts to geckos often.  Now, this is not referring to Gordon Gekko, the fictional Wall Street pest, or even the rather charming animated gecko in the insurance advertisements, but the little creatures that seem to appear around the garden, in the mail box, and even, sometimes, the house.

We definitely have a resident gecko or two in our mailbox and I’m pretty sure I inadvertently chopped off the tail of one when I closed the mailbox door and only then spotted the gecko when it moved quickly away.  I was filled with remorse, but what could one do?  Since there has been appearance of a gecko in and around the mail box since, I cling to the belief that it did in fact survive and simply grew a new tail.  Maybe a better one.

The other day, I noticed a very small one in our bathtub.  Now I need to explain that the tub is not in use since we prefer showers, but it came with the house and is large and marble, albeit cultured marble, so we just dust it from time to time and use the shelf behind it, a large marble shelf below the window there, for plants.   Recently I had a plant crisis that required that I move some cherished plants from the garden room where they were literally cooking in our bitter summer heat, and to make space, I moved the porcelain pot of philodendron (ah, those alliterations) out to the garden room.  Thinking about it later, I must presume that a wandering gecko moved into the philodendron and then got a trip when I moved the philodendron back to the tub shelf.  Then the same adventurous gecko must have emerged and dropped (surprise!) into the tub.  I saw it, greeted it, and went on my way, but a day or so later, noticed it was still there and realized that even geckos can’t always deal with cultured marble when it is that steep a slope and that it would starve there.  So we very carefully tricked the gecko into wiggling into a small envelope, carefully folded the top over and transported the envelope outside to a nice freshly rained-on flower bed and released it.  Which is a much better environment for any critter than that big old tub.

Why so much trouble for a little lizard-type critter?   Well, geckos eat bugs, and while I would be a bit skittish about living very intimately with a gecko or a lizard or a frog, etc., I’m way more skittish about bugs.  Way.