Monday, September 22, 2014

My Lizard Friends

The first thing you notice when you get to Florida is that lizards run this state. No, I'm not talking about the politicians.

They're everywhere. I mean everywhere. After a while you become accustomed to this constant nonstop movement in the periphery of your vision - because everything has lizards crawling all over it. Skittering. Fighting. Jumping. Pulsing big fanlike protuberances from their throats ("dewlaps", they're called.) Doing weird push-up exercises. Gobbling the crumbs you drop and eventually following you around like squirrels, hoping you'll drop more.

Just try and keep geckos out of your house, go on, try, I dare ya. They're so ubiquitous they're known in many circles as simply "house lizards". And the green anoles, oh, the green anoles. And the racerunners and glass lizards and scrub lizards. But it's the brown anoles that, in my experience, are most common down here. I am constantly taking photographs and seeing no lizard in the scene until I get the picture up on my laptop and realize, "oh, look, there's three brown anoles hiding in plain sight."

I hope you like lizards if you come to visit, because you don't have a choice. I'd start learning to speak lizard if I were you.

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