The Bush Baby of the Reptile World

It was after dinner and I was reading the paper when something tickled my leg. I glanced down to see a tiny gecko and watched in fascination as it crawled over my thigh and onto the couch.

Then it disappeared. I went back to reading, too scared to move in case I crushed the little thing. A while later, Siegie noticed my gecko climbing up the opposite wall heading for the portrait of Aunt Rosamond.

I’m not sure how she would have felt about having a baby gecko take shelter behind her. I like to think she would have found it highly entertaining and poured another healthy glass of gin and tonic.

You’ve heard of lounge lizards. We have lounge geckos, which are much more appealing than lizards. I reckon one of the reasons is that lizards look like snakes with legs and you can almost imagine their rounded, shiny bodies slithering along the ground. I simply couldn’t watch a lizard crawling over my leg and think it looked cute.

Geckos, on the other hand, are flatter and duller, their mottled bodies looking much more comfortable running up a wall. Like all nocturnal hunters, they have big eyes, which may make them appear more appealing – the bush babies of the reptile world.

Amongst other inhabitants, our house provides a home to geckos. We see evidence of them behind the bar, where their droppings are often found clinging to the walls. Fortunately, a damp cloth is all that’s needed to rectify this problem.

I suspect geckos like that area because they can hide behind the wall unit during the warm light of day. There’s a nice gap between the unit and the wall, giving refuge to who knows how many creatures.

Mostly, we don’t see the geckos in the house, as they come out in search of their insect prey after we’ve gone to bed. We’re much more likely to see them in the garage or storeroom, where the murky surrounds mean they don’t need to find a place to hide.

Until a blundering human enters. Many times, I’ve opened the door to the storeroom in search of gardening tools only to have a gecko drop down to the ground. Then I have to take part in a juggling act to avoid stepping on it or jamming it in the door frame.

Not long ago, I was searching for a plant pot and came upon a black plastic potting bag. As I picked it up, a few eggs fell out and one broke on the concrete floor. That was minus one baby gecko.

It seems geckos face all sorts of monstrous enemies. Besides heavy-handed humans smashing their eggs or squashing their bodies, there are rain spiders waiting to feast on them.

Inevitably, there’s also the friendly neighbourhood cat, partial to pouncing on anything that wriggles so invitingly. And thereby hangs a tale – or tail.

Hadeda Hiatus

I was sitting reading the paper one late afternoon when a couple of hadedas flew in and made a clumsy landing on the lawn. Soon joined by two more, they started ambling in a slow procession, poking the grass with their large bills.

There’d been a rain shower the night before and the ground was nice and soft. Clearly there were rich pickings: every second prod evoked something juicy that was thrown back into gaping throats. It was a peaceful scene – but it wouldn’t last.

Whoever coined the phrase “let sleeping dogs lie”? As anyone with any sense knows, sleeping dogs keep their ears and eyes in standby mode and wake whenever anything vaguely exciting appears to be about to happen. Unless, of course, they’re about to be thrown out of the house for the night, in which case they pretend to be dead to the world.

At all other times, however, they react to triggers that they know promise reward – such as the food cupboard being opened or hiking boots appearing.

Or hadedas on the lawn. With no warning, there was a sudden explosion from the dog cushions under the stairs and a wild scrabbling of paws on the tiles. Bursting out the sliding door onto the patio, Rhea dashed across the lawn. Great brown birds scattered in all directions, raucously shouting “hah-dee-dah, hah-dee-dah”.

Caught up in the thrill of the chase, Rhea overran the edge of the lawn and collected herself rather ungracefully in the flower beds. Then she looked back over her shoulder and realised that the hadedas had merely flown up into the air and landed back on the lawn behind her. She ran back up the lawn, scattering them once more.

But the hadedas had played this game too often and now they’d landed back on the lawn further down. The dog joined me in the lounge, gathering the remnants of her ridgeback pride, and clunked herself down on the floor. Facing the lawn, she lay with her face on her paws, feigning indifference.

She was watching, however, and soon the temptation once more became too much and she exploded out the door to resume the chase. Sluggishly, they rose up from the lawn, leaving it almost to the last minute, wheeled round and landed again. Head down, Rhea ran at them, again and again. Finally, the hadedas had had enough and disappeared over the roof. Rhea retired to her cushion in triumph.

A few minutes later, Siegie came home. “There are a whole load of hadedas round the front,” he told me.

Rhea and I both knew the reason why. But hers was a fleeting victory: the hadedas would be back on the lawn and she’d have to start hounding them all over again.

Of Butterflies and Goodwill

Largely brown and yellow, with two colourful eye spots, there’s no mistaking the Christmas butterfly when it flutters by. More often called Citrus Swallowtails, they’re common in gardens during December and January.

But butterflies are like birds: if you want them to breed in your garden, you need the right plants. When we decided to make our garden indigenous, we checked up on what would attract the different species. We learned that other than citrus trees, the Cape chestnut was a good food source for the caterpillars of the Citrus Swallowtail.

So we bought a young sapling at the Kirstenbosch Plant Sale. We read up that we could expect our chestnut to flower after about eight years and so we waited patiently. The deadline came and went, and still we waited. Finally, after ten years, we were rewarded with a few flowers. 

Today I stand at the bottom of our garden and look back at the house. Arching over the roof on the right is a beautiful, strong tree covered in a pale pink flush of flowers. It has lived up to its botanical name, Calodendrum capense – beautiful tree from the cape. Maybe, in all its decoration, it should be called the Christmas tree.

In the meantime, we discovered what to plant in our garden for the caterpillars of other butterflies. We learned that Wild Peach trees are great for Garden Acraeas, those ubiquitous orange creatures with transparent wing tips. Arctotis and gazanias are for Painted Ladies, whose caterpillars are the only ones to spin themselves webs. Plumbago is good for the Common Blues, while carpet geranium, of course, attracts the Geranium Bronze.

Sometimes, the caterpillars do quite a lot of damage to our greenery. But once they’ve metamorphosed into their fragile alter egos, it’s all worthwhile. Often, I stand in front of the beds of scabiosa and Cape forget-me-nots, watching the butterflies flit from flower to flower. I once watched four Citrus Swallowtails put on a magnificent aerial ballet outlined against an azure sky. Well worth a few chomped up lemon trees, I reckon.

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m even starting to think that those prolific alien invaders, the European Cabbage Whites, can look rather appealing when dancing above the scabiosa.

Maybe it’s because I’m still basking in festive goodwill. Siegie and I wish you and your families a thrilling 2010, filled with joy, love, life's little essentials – and butterflies.