 | Since we landed here (mid January '09) on Koh Phangan, this small beautiful island in the gulf of Thailand, we've had plenty of opportunity to study the little creatures called "geckos".
I was first introduced to geckos when I traveled around Hawaii some years ago, and also while in Mexico. They are the diminutive members of the reptile family, who would eat all the bugs that might have been flying through or trying to set up house within your abode. Their likeness is on t-shirts, baseball caps, beach towels, key chains, beer bottle openers and tropical batik sarongs. Gieco Insurance company even starred a talking gecko to sell their insurance. They're pretty damned popular little fellas, and we thought we pretty much knew all there was to know about geckos.
| | After landing on this island, I discovered how thin our assumed knowledge of geckos really was.
When we moved into our first house here on Koh Phangan, we discovered that each room in the house had at least one or two of the familiar little gecko guys busily chirping and working at keeping the house free of insects...good lads! During the first night in our new house, we heard an animal call that sounded like a cross between f*ck you and uh-oh followed by a sad moan, repeated a few times, but by the time we tried to locate it, it would be silent. We were truly intrigued. Late afternoon on the following day, Ted heard the uh-oh sound coming from under the eaves of the house. We discovered a very large lizard-like eye watching us from a 1 inch crack where the roof meets the wall. The eye filled the crack and swiveled to follow our movements. I raced for my camera and took a picture and we pondered the relative size of this mystery eyeball. The eyeball was truly massive relative to the little house geckos. I went online sleuthing for Thailand lizard info, and for a crazy second, I thought that perhaps a water monitor lizard had somehow set up house in our roof. Water monitors are pretty damn big and apparently they can give a nasty bite...do they climb?..nah, it couldn't be...could it? Let's be rational for a second...a water monitor lizard lives near water not in our roof? Right? But our house is not to too far from the water...ummm..that's totally silly...it's not a water monitor lizard! |  | We decided that its head was at least the size of a racket ball and our imaginations vaguely filled in the rest of the body, and that was all we could deduce about our uh-oh eaves animal that we assumed was a lizard. More online research suggested a Madagascar Lizard, but we're not on Madagascar so cancel that thought. We wanted to solve the mystery, but we put it on the back burner while we absorbed the fantastic sonic and visual assault of data that was pretty much a regular day on Koh Phangan.
| Every night we'd hear the uh-oh call from both near and far. Finally, on the day when Ted was test driving our new hammock, he quietly called me out to see a real in the flesh uh-oh lizard that had squeezed out from the crack in the eaves and was taking five in the open air. This was the owner of the eyeball, and he was about 12ish inches long, and his head was indeed about the size of a racket ball. Having grabbed my camera on the way out, I got some pictures. The first of an ongoing collection. | So now, we figure we've got it down. The uh-oh lizards are the big guys that live in our roof and in the surrounding coconut palms and yell uh-oh followed by the sad moan, and the geckos are the little pale guys that live in the house who make the chirping sound and eat the bugs. The following month, we moved into a quieter, more remote house in the jungle, and our education about geckos was taken to the next level. We were told by the house's previous occupant, that there was a rather large gecko that lived behind the fridge. We were picturing a fatter, slightly larger version of the nice pale little house geckos. Perfect, glad to have him in our kitchen Rather large" was quite the understatement. The first time I saw our "kitchen gecko" he scared the crap out of me. He was SERIOUSLY "rather large". He scurried across the wall and out through an impossibly small opening and I realized that he was terrified of me. From tip to tail he probably measures about 16 inches, and to him, I guess I must look as SERIOUSLY "rather large" as he does to me. But wait a second, if he's a gecko then what the hell are those cute little chirping guys that live in the house and all over Hawaii and Mexico? |  | I looked it up in the dictionary which gave a great description that applies to both the uh-ohs and the wee chirpers and omitted any helpful mention of size. So now the quest became one of defining what exactly is a gecko. We queried online, queried the locals and long time expat residents, and they all agreed that the uh-ohs were geckos, and the little guys that chirp were called "house lizards". Exactly opposite to what we thought. What we thought were geckos aren't geckos, and what we thought weren't geckos are geckos.
| The jungle house has revealed that an incredible variety of colouration, sizes, and politics exist within the world of the little house lizard. In this new house the pale little chirpers are the minority and stay in the bedroom. The green or grey or grey/blue guys make up the majority, and fight for domination of the deck ceiling near the overhead light. In the bathroom I saw one that was incredible tiny, perhaps an inch tip to tail. Maybe he's just a baby? And, they're not the perfectly peaceful creatures within their relative species that we first assumed. They seem to greatly notice their differences and police their turf based on size and colour.
The variety in house lizards and geckos sizes is perfectly accommodated by the variety in the sizes of insects that are part of everyday living. The small guys eat their size relative bugs, leaving the bigger flies and flying beetles, and bigger still monster sized flying beetles for the geckos. At night we sit on our deck and duck as the occasional disposable-lighter-sized bug zooms by and smashes into the walls a few times before finally landing successfully on the ceiling or the wall. No sooner have they touched down, than the house lizards size them up as do-able or not, or the geckos creep into the picture and the house lizards take a step back to watch their bigger relatives expertly grab a snack.
Some of these insects are so large that only "Gerhart", the massive gecko that lives behind our fridge, can tackle them. Sometimes, when we see a particularly large flying dumb beetle, a jade beetle, or especially one of those "darth vader" beetles with pincer fangs flies into our kitchen, we close the door and listen for the racket that signifies that Gerhart was successful. Gerhart is becoming used to us being around and is a little less shy, and we discovered that he has a girlfriend (Gizelle) who also lives behind the fridge and she's about 3/4's his size. | We queried online, queried the locals and long time expat residents, and they all agreed that the uh-ohs were geckos, and the little guys that chirp were called "house lizards". Exactly opposite to what we thought. What we thought were geckos aren't geckos, and what we thought weren't geckos are geckos. | We set up the camera in the kitchen a few nights ago and filmed him hunting and eating. While filming, a darth vader flew in and Gerhart gave us a great show ending in a crunchy gourmet gecko meal. Gotta love your fridge gecko! I really don't like those pincer fanged fellows.
The night after a rain storm, the ceiling of our deck becomes a festival of bug life, and the geckos and house lizards go on a serious prowl and feeding frenzy. You can literally watch their bellies expanding, and marvel at their technique. When the geckos make a successful bite at a bug, fly, moth, or beetle, it's like a hockey game and we yell "score!", perhaps thats not very buddhist but I'm glad that they make Gerhart, and the others, happy and fat. | In the meanwhile, I'm going to throw all the technical knit picking terminology out the window and just call them all geckos, big and small. "House Lizard" just doesn't do it for me. There's no style or romance in it, whereas "gecko" is a handle that paints a picture, with further definitions supplied by size, from miniscule to massive... So, what is a gecko? As far as I'm concerned, if it's got adhesive feet, is lizard-like, and eats bugs, it's a gecko. 
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