Wild about New Year’s Day

When I got up this morning, there was a Spotted Gecko in my kitchen. He visits sometimes and today I finally found out how he manages to get inside – squeezing through the closed sliding kitchen windows. A veritable saurian Houdini.

Then I came into the study to switch on the computer and collect my stack of emails enticing me to buy watches, support scam con-artists, and increase the size of my penis (flogging miracles are they?). A little later, when I was vacuuming, I found a plastic glue bottle had been dragged behind the bookshelf and consumed. Most of the plastic container included. I have a glue-sniffing rat in the house who got a trifle carried away with its NewYear’s Eve partying?

I am now looking for a dead rat with glued up insides. Now that’s constipation.

I can hear the resident Crested Serpent-eagle over the house as I type. And the local cuckoos – known as the Koel after their repetitive, ringing call rather like a frenetic car alarm – are gearing up to the mating season at this time of year too. In spite of their noise, I favour their presence in our jungle-garden because they parasitize the introduced House Crow.

There was also a monkey on the roof this morning.

We are used to the urbanised and aggressive Long-tailed Macaques coming around occasionally to steal the fruit from the trees and the scraps from the rubbish bin if they can get to it, but this fellow announced himself with the explosive chek-chek-chek-chek of the Banded Leaf-Monkey, a much more elegant chap.

However, to have him crashing across our roof from back to front, thrashing through the trees in the front garden and then back again across the roof and down the other side of the house, scrambling across the bamboos to the mango trees before finally exiting up the hill to the golf course – that upset me.

Leaf monkeys are gregarious forest dwellers, and this one was highly upset and lonely. I suspect the troupe may have been broken up by the final clearing of a forest patch where a new housing development is going up nearby.

I wish people would think about what they do to the world when they have 6 kids. Trebling the world’s population has consequences.


Comments

Wild about New Year’s Day — 3 Comments

  1. Ninja gecko coming through the walls, heh.

    I know the plight of the leaf monkey is no laughing matter, but when you mentioned he was heading for the golf course it put me in mind of a (human) yuppy party-goer heading for his early morning nine-hole round after a night out on the town (though the monkey probably has a better handicap against par).

  2. Do we ever learn from historical events where a burgeoning population density and the ravaging of natural resources leads to disaster?.

    Two examples comes to mind:
    Angkor Wat and Easter Island (Rapa Nui).

  3. Alas, no one ever learns from history. I was totally gobsmacked by the present Bush administration’s ability to overlook the lessons of Vietnam when they went to invade Iraq – and that earlier disaster was within their living memory.

    Golf and monkeys? Hmmm…

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