Cool Critters!

Every day we are finding interesting new critters! As the seasons change, the animals change too. This guy to the right is some kind of Praying Mantis, which we hope you guys can help us identify! So far we have only seen one individual, but it was probably the coolest insect either of us have ever seen. Like many of the insects we are finding, this guy had a leaf body! Good for blending in to his leafy environment.

This lizard to the left is my personal favourite. It's a Yucatan Banded Gecko! This is a terrestrial gecko, much like the leopard geckos you can find in pet stores at home. Over the Easter weekend I took the neighbour kids down to the stream for a herp walk, one of their cousins was visiting and he was really into snakes and wanted to find a snake. We didn't have any luck in the snake department, but we did find this gecko running across the orchard at the bottom of the hill. I kept him overnight for a good daytime photo shoot, and then let him go the following evening.

The Hercules beetle!! Mat was out bbq'ing one night when this giant heavy beetle flew into the garage area and crashed onto the table. In this picture you can't tell how big he is, but believe me he is huge! About the length of my hand, and really heavy. Amazing!

We are always finding spectacular moths here, but can rarely identify any of them. We are in desperate need of an entomologist at our place! This is one of the more beautiful ones we have found to date. The colours in this photo don't do him justice though - the wing bars are a deep vivid green and he has bright pink edging on the inside of his wings.






We had one of our workers build us a cement wall to help us prevent erosion on one corner of our house. The water cistern is there so it tends to fill up quickly in heavy rains and spill down the bank, creating a lot of erosion. The cement wall and drainage canal Erwin built works perfectly, but one thing we did not imagine was the build up of frogs in this new location!! One night during heavy rains a chorus of about 6 Baudin's Treefrogs started up, waking us from a dead sleep. The cistern is right at the back of the house beside the porch, which is right beside our bedroom window. They make these really loud honking sounds, both of us had dreams of traffic jams before waking up and realizing it was just the frog chorus. Good luck trying to sleep through it though. Mat and I ran outside in the middle of the night in pouring rain trying to catch these guys, put them in a big garbage pail, and move them down to a lower drainage area.......but to no available. But they kept disappearing under the porch! I still don't know where they went. Somehow even the one guy I did manage to catch and put in the pail busted out of the pail despite having a sealed lid on it. Like magic. We were no match for these frogs. Eventually it stopped raining and the frog raucous subsided and we drifted back to sleep.........