Critters of the Night, Visitors and Pests

We feed these guys... they are like our pigs that eat all our scraps... they really like coconut but are not picky. In fact every night we see like 10 to 20 in the pile and lately they have been working their way into our garden.


I also discovered a hermit crab tonight that was living in a lego, he was not homeless, just living in a piece of trash. Poor little guy, maybe tomorrow I will go into the jungle to help him house hunt. There are plenty of shells out there.


Tonight (Heath has hospital duty) I was taking out some banana bread that the ants discovered and heard claws at my feet just at the end of my patio... Heath has been wanting to catch a coconut crab (ayuyu), feed it coconut and eventually eat it... they are supposedly deliciously sweet. However, their pinch is incredibly painful and they wont let go until you break off their claw... I was not about to catch this one just in case it is an Ayuyu and not just a land crab.



These little neighbors surround us... they are fabulous alarm clocks... any time of day! I thought it would just be morning, but that must just be what they are known for because they yell all day long! The past few weeks many of them had babies, the bottom picture has four... where's waldo, penny, franko and fuzzy?



Long legged friends. This praying mantis was just hanging out with me as I gardened. The Banana Spiders... that is what we have heard some call them, can be found in our flowers, or the tangen tangen (jungle bush) at anytime. However the woolly one, we think is a wolf spider, huge and easily scared. Both harmless... we think.





One last critter, this one I like the least. Many of you know I am not a cat fan. Also, many of you know that things that I am allergic to are drawn to me. Well, this critter fits both categories... It finds shade under my car scaring me every time I open my car door, I have found it sitting at every one of our doormats, it also runs into our windows trying to catch bugs or geckos. Not only that, I think it has cataracts, so it glares at me, of course I glare back with my cataracts and all. But isn't that a lovely thing to be doing for the camera? Do you think it is saying, "kiss my butt, I lived here first"?


P.S. Of all the critters I have encountered here, the most domestic I am not a fan of. The boonie dogs scare me, I have to run with a stick for protection and I still run afraid.

P.P.S. The brown snakes you all hear about, I can no longer say we haven't seen any. We saw our first on the road home the other night. But most people who live here long term have only seen a couple.