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Beverly
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Posts: 25
Joined: Thu Aug 20, 2015 12:02 pm
Location: Colima, Mexico (USDA Zone 11)

Meet one of my garden geckos

I love these little guys. They eat insects (lots of ants I hope) including mosquitoes. Sometimes they are in the garden and sometimes they are in the house. No one I know seems to be bothered by having them in the house. They clear up the insects and only leave small poops in return. They move so fast, it is hard to get a decent photo. This one was on the garden wall, I did not look at him, but returned to the house for the camera. If you make eye contact or show interest in some way, they zoom off. I returned with the camera on and focused, also with my back to the gecko...then I turned and snapped. Some geckos are extravagantly colorful. In the garden I only find this mousy colored variety. There are 1500 species worldwide ranging from a little over a half inch to 24 inches (1.6-60cm). This one is about 9" (23cm).

Unique to geckos are the sounds they make when socially interacting with other geckos, some people describe this as a "chirpping". To me it sounds like smacking lips or sloppy kissing. In Mexico geckos are called "besceros" (kissers). To me they are a much loved garden treasure.
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imafan26
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Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

I have a lot of anole in the garden they kind of look like geckos and skinks at least 20 in the front yard and the more than that in the back yard. They are part of the garden patrol. In the house geckos cause a lot of problems. They are territorial and follow the same path every day. They poop on my curtains and on the wall behind them and in the Spring, my fire alarm goes off at 3 am because the geckos like to nest in there because it is warm and they short circuit the thing. Even the bug resistant alarm isn't safe. One would poop on my range every day. Very annoying. However, my 2 year old cat is a good hunter and they haven't been a problem for a while.

In the garden they eat ants, earthworms, grubs, small gnats, mosquitoes, and I think they are also eating beetles, because they are not that much of a problem for me. The greenhouse frogs eat mostly ants. The birds, well, they like fruit except for the cattle egret which will eat mice, lizards and anything else crawling in newly mowed grass.

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Beverly
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Posts: 25
Joined: Thu Aug 20, 2015 12:02 pm
Location: Colima, Mexico (USDA Zone 11)

Sounds like you have a whole circus full of geckos in your house. If I had all those problems, I'd probably be crabby too. The geckos do not nest in my house, nor do they cause problems. They come and go and not in large numbers.



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