The shack we stay in is partly open on two sides. There is no door. Anything can come in any time it wants, and there's not much we can do about it if we're asleep or not home. As you can imagine, this arrangement has its drawbacks. We now have three rat traps set up around the shack, mainly to protect our food. We've made two fruit fly traps from jars filled with an inch of vinegar and hole-punched plastic stretched across the openings, because it's gross to have hundreds of fruit flies where you live and eat.
But the same arrangement has benefits. Some mornings we have stunning, green day geckos hunting for bugs in the kitchen corner. We first noticed them climbing around on the walls outside the shack a couple of days after we arrived. They're bright green with three red spots on their backs, like paint splashes, toward their hind legs, and blue toes. I've included a picture of one that I think might be one of the best pictures I've ever taken, simply because the animal is so impressive to look at.
So far we've seen three of them—one about six inches long, the other two a little shorter and less thickly built. One of the smaller geckos has made itself useful by eating some of the fruit flies and ants that congregate around the narrow window over the propane stove.
We've seen other, less colorful geckos, the nocturnal species, often hunting around in the spaces between the corrugated metal roof and the beams. According to an article Hannah read on the way here, geckos, while not native to Hawaii, have been here for 1500 years, brought over on boats going between the Hawaiian islands and Tahiti. The colorful day geckos are more recent. A naturalist released some into the wild in the '70's for no other reason than he thought it would be cool to have them here. He was right, if incredibly irresponsible. People like them so much that they're reluctant to give them up to animal control officials. I can't say I blame them. We really enjoy the ones we have.
There are chameleons as well, but I'm not expert enough on the subject reptiles to identify them properly. They're very different from geckos, with smaller eyes, longer, more streamlined faces, skinny tails, and thinner, clawed, more elongated toes. They engage in territorial behavior such as push-up displays (which I've observed in one Southwestern species as well), and puffing out a round, flat neck-frill. They also seem aggressive; I've seen a couple chase off lizards that come too close.
Earlier I mentioned a vague, nagging fear about the idea of tarantulas on Hawai'i. I associate tarantulas with banana trees (which you can blame on Harry Belefonte), and there are a lot of those on the island. Janice never said anything about them, and I'm actually pretty sure that Brady Bunch episode was full of shit.
It might have been nice if she had said something about cane spiders, though. I'm not saying I wouldn't have come to Hawaii if I had known about them, but it might have been nice to mentally prepare myself for the eventuality of their arrival in the shack.
Take a good look at the pictures I've included here. Those are two of three different spiders that have turned up in our living space. The first one, the one pictured both on a package of toilet paper and in my gloved hand as I was preparing to release it into the guinea grass, I spotted one evening as I was reaching for a book under the bed. I was taken very much by surprise, accompanied by a feeling that was, oddly, something like relief. At least now I knew. There are big spiders here, and here was one of them. It was big, but not tarantula big. More like a very young tarantula, or a very, very large garden spider.
I put on a glove and snatched it up to take it outside. I'm like a lot of people in that I'm pretty creeped out by spiders, but I had no interest in harming it. I just didn't want it crawling across our sleeping faces one night while it looked for something to eat. We have rats for that. I walked about thirty feet from the shack and placed it on the fallen branch of a pigeon pea tree. I was astonished to feel how strong it was as it pushed its way out from between my fingers, and unnerved to see it leap two feet like a grasshopper to first one blade of guinea grass, then another, and on into the darkness.
I thought to myself, I hope that's the only one I see for a really long time. No such luck. A week later, in the space of a few hours, two more appeared. As I write this, the smaller of the two still lives on top of one of the beams, nestled in the little archway made by one of the hollows in the corrugated roof. It comes out for a few hours during the day to sit and wait for stray insects to fly by. The bigger one is the biggest I've seen so far. It could probably cover the palm of my hand with leg to spare. I discovered it hiding behind the washcloth we have hanging from a nail next to the bed.
By this time, as a result of all the fruit we had, there was a serious bug problem in our tiny house.
“I wonder if he'll eat some of the bugs in here,” Hannah mused, and as if by way of an audition, the arachnid grabbed a small moth out of the air with its forelegs and hungrily consumed it. In both appearance and behavior, it reminded me a lot of a crab. I was both horrified and fascinated. I'd never seen a spider hunt in that manner, with no recourse to a web.
As nervous as I was having it around, it was that behavior that resigned me to its presence; I have no problem with giant spiders if they help clean up around the house. And don't bite me.
I said something about it to Janice the next morning and she said she'd never heard of anyone being bitten by a cane spider. After watching it feed, I wonder if it even has much venom, or any. Spiders use venom to immobilize their prey and suck the juices from them at a later time. The spider I saw ate that moth like a man wolfing down a buffalo wing. A disturbing sight, but it makes me feel more secure that we don't have spider bites to worry about.
I want to leave off by saying that, in spite of how negative some of the experiences I recount might sound, we really do get a kick out of our new environment, and the novel and sometimes enchanting creatures we share it with. Every morning we've woken to the song of a female cardinal, her staccato chirps heralding us out of bed at around 6:30, and continuing on for a good hour or more after that. Sometimes her mate turns up, a bird with brilliant red plumage that stands out against the greens and browns of our surroundings like a stop light. There are tiny, fat little green birds and even smaller birds with with reddish feathers on their heads and tails that keep us company throughout the day. There are husky bumblebees that hover around the blossoming plants. At night, for the last couple of weeks, we can hear whales exhaling noisily through their blowholes and slapping their tails on the water. The sounds have grown more frequent, indicating that more might be gathering for the winter mating season. I want us to try to make an effort to see them from shore, now that we know a way to get closer to the water from where we're situated. That's the kind of thing we came to Hawaii to experience, including everything we've experienced so far. And as our stay lengthens, we'll savor these times that I don't think we could have had anywhere else.
I lived on a former coffee plantation planted over to bananas. The shack, palatial by some standards having two rooms and four walls, was shared with a fair sampling of common house geckos, LARGE spiders, roaches and ants, ants and ants.
ReplyDeleteThe local guy I bunked with told me to observe how, each day, the geckos would appear to make a steady ascent to the ceiling, touch their nose at the apex and then descend floor ward before nightfall. This did seem to be so even if it might have been a charming twit on a young haole girl.
The bed covers were pulled back and brushed for spiders before sleep; otherwise we left them and the geckos alone to slay bugs. Once, meditating in the outhouse, I enjoyed watching a smallish spider stalk, pounce on and rassle a fair-sized roach into breakfast mode.
The ants and roaches were disgusting. Not a solitary crumb could be overlooked or, on entering the shack, a great chain and rabble of them could be glimpsed and heard scuttling for cover. Needless to say, I tried to keep a very sanitary kitchen.
A ways down the hill from the shack was an avocado tree called a pear tree in localese. One evening, I was alone on the property washing dishes, near the cistern outside, and heard a commotion in the vicinity of the pear tree. I had been told that wild pigs would occasionally come to forage there and that it wasn't a good place to explore. I got chills and hotfooted it inside leaving the pan of dirty dishes till morning. While I lived there I saw only one wild pig as it raced across the road curly tusks, black bristles and all.
Are there still mongooses around? They used to make a ruckus under the apartment I rented in Kona. For a weasel, they are sure ugly little cusses. How about wild goats? The guys had no luck hunting one down for a luau so I never got a taste.