Florida Fauna

When we left Connecticut, at our goodbye party our cake had a giant plastic bug on it. Very amusing. They all thought that we would have to contend with bugs the size of platters and various other creatures!

What we actually found were sweet little gecko lizards. They are everywhere here, especially in summer, when they fly off the side of the house and scamper over the landscaping stones when you come out your front door. They vary in size from teensy, about an inch long, to pretty gigantic in the gecko world (although not quite as big-seeming as the fellow in the insurance ads. Why does he have an English accent, anyway?), about 5 inches long. Thanks to Charlie, our pest control guy, any insects I ever found inside the house were dead! (Of course I have to amend that, because we have a moth invasion from some pancake mix, and occasional swarms of ants on our guest bedroom window, fortunately not when any guests happen to be in it!) We lived very happily with these creatures until....

One of our neighbors was walking his dogs at sunset, and he happened to be walking by when I was in the garage, so we stopped and visited for a minute. "So," he said, "are you aware you have bats in your belfry?" "Uh....come again?" Evidently he had seen a number of bats flying around our chimney..."huh...." I said. He told me this in May.
In late September, I happened to be in the office on the computer, when I heard a "thunk" on the blinds on the window next to me. I glanced in the direction of the sound and jumped up screaming! For there, inching its way up the vertical blind slat slowly, was a little bat. He was about 8 inches long and more afraid of me than I was of him. Where was Scott? He was working and I happened to be off. Of COURSE he was working...so I thought to myself how do I get this bat out of my house??? I closed the office door and ran to the kitchen, got a big wad of paper towels, grabbed the little guy, (I had a quick peek at his face, which was horrified at the idea of being treated this way), ran screaming out our front door, with our dog, Luke, barking after me, and threw the paper towel wad with all my might! Then I high-tailed it back into the house, dragging Luke with me...
Next morning, when Scott came home from work, I relayed all this information to him, and he listened, shaking his head...vowing to examine the chimney for signs of the critters. (He found nothing inside it) I thought, oh well, there was just one guy who found his way into the chimney...
A couple weeks later I had gone out with the girls after work, and yes, I had a little to drink. I arrived home around 9:30 or so. (you guessed it, Scott was working)...so I went to the computer to get my email, when I heard....flutter, flutter, flutter coming from the general direction of the chimney...I went to investigate, made sure the glass fireplace doors were firmly closed, and went back to the office. After about half an hour, Luke started frantically barking, and he was staring at our stereo speaker (we had the old, piece-of-furniture kind)...so I carefully moved it, and there was a bat behind it! So I went to the kitchen, grabbed a tupperware container and a piece of cardboard, put the bowl upside down on top of the bat, slid the cardboard underneath it, ran screaming out the front door with Luke barking after me! A few minutes later I retrieved my bowl (empty), and so it went.
The next day, Scott was off, so when he got up he called the Florida Wildlife Guy. He told Scott how to get rid of the bats (wait till they are gone at night then seal up the chimney) because if he had come he would have charged us 200 bucks an hour or something. We opted, needless to say, to have Scott do it. The guy said we could wait till sunset to see how many of them there were, so we did. We sat by the pool, staring at the chimney, and saw how they were getting in...there was a spot in the corner where the aluminum flashing met the body of the chimney that had come loose, so they were happily setting up housekeeping inside that spot! And we watched.....and watched.....and probably hundreds of them flew out from the chimney, chattering to each other as they left...saying bat things like, "they're having a sale at Walmart!" and so on...
After dark, Scott got the ladder and got up on the roof and put sealant on the flashing, which was quick-drying, and hardened within an hour....with lots of neighbors adding their two cents: "Are you going to send them to my house?" "Watch out for guano! It's slippery!"
The next morning we waited to see what would happen when they came back...and boy were they pissed! They tried and tried and tried to get back in that chimney and couldn't and eventually they all left.........or so we thought........out of the corner of my eye I noticed that one of them was flying around the inside of the pool cage! How DO they DO that??? So Scott took care of getting rid of the last bat, and one more thing happened. When we opened the back door to go back into the house, our cat chased this poor, hapless frog into the house and was playing with the poor thing. I finally caught it and put him outside our pool cage door....and he was gone when I looked a little while later.
Froggies do visit the pool from time to time and unfortunately they frequently die and end up in the pool skimmer. Oh, and one time a frog jumped out at me from the toilet in the guest bathroom! Geez, good thing my heart is strong...
There is a "lake" (and I use that term loosely) behind us, and I've seen various herons and ducks headed for that location with quick stops on our garage roof to scope out the area...and in winter, beautiful hawks and ospreys. One time I actually saw a bald eagle fly by! But nobody would ever believe what happened next, bird-wise.
I was out by the pool reading one day, when I saw this beautiful heron land on my neighbor's roof with a fish in its mouth! It didn't take Luke long to figure out that he was there, and he jumped up and barked his head off! This caused the heron to fly off, but not before he dropped the fish on the neighbor's roof! Next evening when we were out with the dog, we saw our neighbor, Steve, and said, "So! Are you going to get that fish off your roof?" He said, "What fish?" We told him the story, and he just smiled and shook his head...We DID feel a little sorry for him, because he was in his 70s having to go up on his roof. At least his roof didn't have the steep pitch that ours did...
And that's our experience with the wildlife. No gators, not yet! But we've seen peacocks running wild in the neighborhood. And buzzards! Supposedly, quite recently, a gator was actually sighted in one of the "lakes"....and, incredibly, a coyote walked by one evening! But we've seen neither. A little too big for my wad of paper towels...