I’ve never known a window screen to give more than a polite suggestion that small flying insects and spiders (and the tiny vertebrates who might one day grow big enough to eat them) might all be happier living outdoors.
And since we leave the windows open 24/7, the separation between indoors and outdoors is more a concept than a reality. Without so much as a by-your-leave, dust and dirt drift in from the gravel road to coat every horizontal surface. Bugs and spiders crawl through the cracks and over the thresholds to make themselves at home in the corners. Tiny lizards and geckos slip past the eternally flapped-open magnetic door screens that keep sticking to the metal doors.
I welcome the geckos because they keep the indoor ecosystem in balance. Unfortunately, our cats have been less than welcoming, thereby tilting our ecosystem in favor of the bugs. I’ve been trying to encourage Day Geckos and Anole lizards and the native house geckos to hang around by enhancing their outdoor habitat and our lanai with plantings and hiding places.
You can probably imagine how thrilled I was to look up from the TV one evening to see a tiny 1.5-inch-long gecko strutting across the wall. (Maybe I manifested him by adding a gecko to a floor cloth I made with all our pets’ portraits on it!)
I don’t know whether it’s a he or she, but I just want to say he, so I’m going with that, and taking it a step further by naming him Norman. He’s a Gold Dust Day Gecko, native to Madagascar, an invasive species that is more aggressive than the native house gecko it threatens. But Gold Dust Day Geckos are SO DAMN CUTE that it’s impossible not to love them.
I made sure Norman saw me set out a beer cap full of strawberry-jam-enhanced water on a windowsill so he could survive until he could find and catch the right size (teeny-tiny) bugs.
Then a few days ago, I was watering the plants on the lanai when I spotted him lying on the floor, missing his tail (so only an inch long now). I slid a bulk-mail envelope under him to pick him up, then carried him to a flower basket on the lanai, where I put a spoonful of jelly-enhanced water for him to sip while he recovered.
I went inside to refill the water can, then came out to see two much larger geckos looming over Norman with murder in their eyes. Day Geckos will eat smaller geckos, so I scooped up Norman in the jelly-water spoon and hurried into the kitchen to find a glass jar to keep him in until I could come up with a better plan.
I tilted the spoon to transfer Norman to the jar, but he decided I was up to no good, so he backed into the clump of jelly and got stuck as surely as a sabretooth in the La Brea Tar Pits. He struggled to escape, fell out of the spoon onto the windowsill, flipped over onto his back, writhed around for a bit, then played dead with his feet in the air.
Nearly as hysterical as Norman now (because we both feared I might kill him, and accident or no, the effect is the same) I flipped him back over and dripped water on him to wash off the jelly. I put him in the jar, which I set on the kitchen windowsill with the lid off so he could abscond when he’d recovered from the stress of the day.
I later found him in the sink, dangerously close to entering the garbage disposal. My heart rate had finally normalized somewhat, and I didn’t want to scare Norman and me both by accidentally grinding him up in the disposal, so I put him back in the jar, this time adding a lid. Norman was by now convinced that I was planning to detain, torture, and kill him. I was beginning to suspect that Norman was a very accident-prone gecko.
I drove into town and found two narrow-enough glass vases to set in the windowsill but wide-enough and tall-enough to make a terrarium-style planter where Norman could stay for safety or leave at will. I put him in his new digs on a different windowsill, far away from the garbage disposal. Later, I found him caught in cobwebs in the sliding window’s track. I scooped him up in a spoon and plucked away the spiderwebs, then put him back into his open-ended terrarium.
By bedtime, we both needed a break from the stress. I gave him some thrip-infested leaves and a capful of water to sustain him overnight and left him alone. The next morning, he seemed less concerned that I might be planning his murder, but still not happy to let me observe him or take pictures of him cautiously lounging on the 1/4” rim of the glass-vase terrarium.
He’s been doing fine for about a week now. Sometimes I can spot him lounging near his fancy glass house, other times there’s no telling where he is. I really like this critter, and I hope he decides to stay and be our official house gecko. He seems to have learned to keep off the floors, and I can only hope that he’ll avoid the toilets and the kitchen sink.
He doesn’t trust me much yet, so I doubt he’ll listen to any of my wild stories about the places in this house that aren’t exactly gecko safe. But I’m gonna post Norman’s picture on my website’s animal-communication forum for my students to practice with, and maybe he’ll listen to one of them. I hope so, because I never want to see Norman accidentally swirling down the toilet drain.
