I wrote about the petrified frog I found in my kitchen last month and now this morning when I got home from work I'm sitting in my living room watching TV and I notice something on the floor next to my TV...I saw it was a gecko, like the thousands I see every day, but on closer inspection I notice something really strange about this lizard. It wasn't moving at all. I got closer and found that this little fucker was completely mummified. This was really strange considering I was sitting in the same spot the night before watching TV before work and I'm sure this little guy wasn't there.
It's almost as if it appeared all by it self over night while I was at work, like my condo is some sacred place where reptiles got to die... Like the fabled elephant graveyard of yore...
bizarre.
On to other strangeness... Last night at work I'm hauling about 60 loaded cane cars along the tracks and we're tooling along the main line at speed. I'm sitting in the conductor's seat in the cab of the locomotive looking out ahead of my train and I notice an alligator on the tracks. I mention it to my engineer and he laughed... "We get them on the tracks all the time... See ya, gator!"
Crunch one gator.
Later on in the evening I got a little surprise. I was standing at a switch stand giving the engineer signals to back up because we were spotting several empty cane cars onto a siding and I hear a loud hiss... I shine my lantern out in the direction of the sound and see a six foot gator looking back at me about ten yards away... I just did what I remembered from Panama with the caymans... Don't fuck with them and they won't fuck with you. I made the move with my train and from now on I'll be a tad bit more aware of my surroundings when getting off my locomotive in the middle of the night.
I kind of like my position on the food chain... The top.
Last item of note. As I said before I'm new here in Florida and am still learning about the wildlife here... I've noticed in the past few weeks several turtle shells inside the tracks while I was working... Meaning dead turtles. Large ones, some about a foot and a half in diameter. I brought this up in conversation at work and discovered that this also happens all the time. I'm not sure if it's funny or sad... Maybe funny in an ironic sort of way. Seems the turtles, when crossing the tracks, figure out how to get over one rail, but when they get between the tracks can't figure out how to get over the second rail and die there. Hence all the turtle shells on the tracks. So Florida is not only filled with mummified reptiles, it's full of stupid turtles.
Copyright 2006 Thomas J Wolfenden
17 comments:
Jesus. Critters that could eat ya, and someone coming in yer place and leaving presents?
Awww, poor turtles!
As for the gators, tough titties! Squish 'em, and DO be careful!
That dried-up gecko is freaky!
That is one of the creepiest pictures I've seen in some time. Yuck!
Fathairybastard: Weird shit happens to me all the time. I'm used to it.
Phlem: Yeah, I kind of feel sorry for the turtles myself... And I don't care one way or another about the gators, but they do taste good!
Crazy Me: You think that's creepy? You've obviously missed the picture of the mummified frog I found in my kitchen last month.
Well at least your mummified guests are SMALL! It could be worse, you know--you could get mummified crocogators. :)
If you're like me, you'll put them somewhere for a while and just look at them from time to time.
They're just fascinating like that!
Ewww, I don't think I could handle living in Florida. That gecko looks pretty scary. Ick, makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.
CMK: True, but the minute I find a mummified wombat I'm outta here!
Mushy: I've got the gecko on my TV at the moment.
Bev: It is a little creepy, but it's not that bad...
That gecko is wild. I'm glad you took a pic. I wouldn't have believed ya otherwise. heehee. (Ok. I would have. But glad you took the pic anyway.)
Yea, but how does a mummified critter just materialize in front of yer TV? That shit is really weird.
You got the condo from the company, right? Could it be that one of the guys is messing with you since you got your first Gator?
Have you considered adding it to soup? Kinda' like gecko bullion?
I'll take my earthquakes and "volcanoes" over hurricanes, gators, poison snakes and zombie amphibians any day.
I'm so glad that doesn't happen to me!!! The only corpses I see around here are the crickets that my dog kills but refuses to finish eating.
do geckos shed their skin like snakes? i thought maybe it was just a skin with no inside bits
Reminds me of my childhood, when we found those escaped anole lizards dried up around the house, behind the couch, etc.
That is some crazy stuff! I'm with Lisa, without the pic I wouldn't have believed it either.
I know this comment is a little late but when I saw that lizard I knew I had to read on.
The turtle thing made me laugh a little though...makes you think a little....carefull with what u getr into, you might not be able to get out of it!
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