Geckos alive

Among my favorite animals are geckos, those funny pad-toed, round-headed and often very vocal lizards. They are frequent inside buildings in warm climes, and more often then not my hotel room will have a resident gecko or two. One room I stayed in in Namibia (at Erongo Wilderness Lodge) had 11 geckos at one time--six in the bathroom alone. Fortunately, they eat lots of bugs so they're a good addition to the furniture. They tend to go after bugs which have been attracted to lights. (An aside: birds also tend to be attracted to such bugs, and in turn, birders. I have spent many early morning hours, particularly in Ecuador, watching birds munching on bugs that had been attracted to lights left on all night.) In Madagascar one time I noticed a bug stuck behind a curtain of a dining room window. I watched as a gecko came from the other side of the room, fifteen feet away, walking in spurts towards the bug, before dashing behind the curtain and having itself a nice snack.

Nonetheless, I was surprised when I walked into my bedroom in Cape Town last night to find a very tiny gecko adorning the wall (in the photos below). I hope he likes eating cockroaches.


Madagascar has an incredible diversity of geckos. One very common endemic genus is the day geckos--genus Phelsuma. This is a very common one, Phelsuma lineata, on an endemic Pandanus (sometimes in English called screwpine) in the rainforests of Madagascar.



However, there is no question as to the world's most remarkable geckos. That title belongs to another genus endemic to Madagascar, the Uroplatus leaf-tailed geckos. They are nocturnal, ultra-camouflaged rainforest reptiles, who pass the day looking exactly like whatever it is they are resting on. The photo below is of the largest species, Uroplatus fimbriatus, giant leaf-tailed gecko. I took the photo on the island of Nosy Mangabe (Nosy meaning 'island' in Malagasy). They are virtually impossible to find without the assistance of a local guide.