Lizards!

I worried, shortly after we moved into the new house, that we had neither seen nor heard any lizards or geckos. I've always been fond of lizards, and I had looked forward to the chirping song of the warty little Mediterranean geckos that are so common throughout Central and South Texas.

For the longest time, they eluded us. Then, one day as we were walking out the front door, Tamara knelt and scooped a baby gecko off the floor before gently releasing it in the monkey grass out front.

Only a day later, I heard a rustling in some live oak understory, and looked up to see the little guy pictured here. It's a green anole (properly the "Carolina anole"), the small, native iguanid we called "chameleons" when we were kids, for their ability to change from green to brown and back again.

The geckos are well-established imports, another critter that has raced across the southern U.S. since its accidental introduction at ... Galveston? New Orleans? Miami? I don't know where the first gecko stepped off a ship or out of a shipping container, but I'm not unhapy they're here.

I think they complement, rather than compete directly with, the native anoles.

One of four species of "house geckos," Mediterraneans are another species -- like Great-tailed grackles -- that have a long association with human population centers. They're rarely found very far away from human habitation.

And, unlike green anoles, which are diurnal, Mediterranean geckos hunt primarily at night and in particular around outdoor lights. Where they're prevalent, it's not unusual to see half a dozen or more gathered on a vertical wall or window screen, waiting for moths and other bugs that flutter around the light.

Since the first sighting last week near the front door, we've spotted two more very young geckos on the back porch.

I'm still puzzled why, for nearly a month, we saw no lizards or geckos, and now we've seen four juveniles all in the space of a week. It could be that the snakes, mentioned in another post, have been gobbling the adults or that the chatter of jays that periodically hunt through the backyard have been picking them off.

It could be something else.

Whatever caused their absence, I'm happy to have some here now. Lizards and geckos, like frogs and newts, can be useful barometers of ecological conditions. A happy, healthy lizard population in the backyard might tell us that our backyard is doing okay.