Then cleaned up all the lizards that Maddy had murdered. This one was really pretty and had a strawberry-looking dewlap! (Had to look this word up - knew there had to be a specific word for it: "dewlap: a fold of loose skin hanging from the neck or throat of an animal, especially that present in many cattle."
Also, this little charmer showed up and woke me up around 6:30am when he screamed the word "GECK-KO!" (They really do this and it's almost unbelievable that a tiny lizard makes this noise!)
After lunch on Saturday, Meredith and I were walking home and we decided to pop into our local pet store and look at the animals. We were in the back looking at the lizards and we found a tank that had three lizards (all skinks) in it. Two of the skinks were big and colorful, the other skink was smaller and less colorful. Right as we were standing there watching them, one of the big skinks runs all the way across the cage and starts attacking the small skink!
At first we thought they were just play-fighting, but then the big skink starting swallowing his friend whole! It was totally shocking. So shocking that I didn't even think to take my camera out until we was half-finished eating him and then I snapped this picture
The thing wriggled like that for almost 2 minutes before finally running out of juice. A few minutes later, a pet-store employee walked by and we told what we'd witnessed and showed him the video and he was like "Oh, man. I gotta show this to my boss. I keep telling him this is why nobody but me should be allowed to do the lizards! You can't put a little guy like that in with the skinks! What was he thinking?" Anyway, it was pretty crazy. Put Discovery in HD to shame!
On the way out the reserve, we can across another blue iguana sunning himself on a patch of grass right next to bench. He didn't seem to mind us either and let us get close and take some photos.
THIS CLOSE! This photo was taken with a 24mm lens with no zoom! If you're not a photography person you probably don't know what that means. So to put it another way...
I turned to where she was pointing and saw that there was a blue iguana standing right in the middle of the path! Meredith and I immediately got all "Mission: Impossible" and decided to sneak up on the iguana and see how close we could get! The answer?
Grand Cayman is famous for being one of the few places in the world that has blue iguanas - and our first stop was a huge wildlife preserve where you could (if you're lucky) see them. Here's Mer out front with a huge blue iguana.
Look how cute he was! I was amazed to discover that something so tiny could make such a huge noise! If you haven't ever heard what a gecko sound like, click here to listen to a recording of what I'm talking about (otherwise the whole "banging on a muffled cowbell" thing doesn't sound very believable).
Oh, I forgot to mention! A few times I was scared awake by what sounded like someone ringing a muffled cowbell and then saying "GET-GOOOO! GET-GOOOOO!" right outside of my bungalow! I'd wake up in a panic and open my bungalow door and there'd be nothing! After like the third night in a row of this happening, I mentioned it the girls and they were like "Oh, you have a gecko in your room! That's what they sound like! And that's why they're called geckos because it sounds like they're saying 'geck-goooo!'" While I was reading in the evening, my critter revealed himself.
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