Island Critters

Denise and I have seen a wide variety of critters on the island from cool looking bugs, to small and large lizards and iguana's.  When I remember, or have my phone with me, I take a picture of the animals and thought I'd share a few since I've been asked by friends what we have here.  Sadly most of the iguana's we've seen have been dead on the road, and I'm not stopping for a photo op.  You can click on a picture and scroll through and enlarge them. 

There are three different types of frogs and toads we've seen.  These guys are pretty cool and our cat Jack hopefully has learned not to mess with them.  We hear they have a coating on their skin that can make a predators day turn bad really quickly.  Jack found one in our room and after I put it outside he spent the next hour licking his lips trying to get it off.  Fortunately he didn't have any additional issues. 

We also have white frogs that hang out above the bathroom shower window.  That side of the house gets the rain which they like.  We have a louvered window in the shower with a screen inside and we were getting cold so I closed it after removing the frogs.  After about 2 weeks our bathroom started stinking really bad.  Turns out I missed a frog and he ended up tangled in the linkage.  Removing the rotted frog was pretty disgusting.  

This toad is huge, around the size of a soft ball!  The dogs don't mess with him and he pretty much owns the property. 

Sorry for the bad photo.  These are tropical house gecko's and commonly known as Wood Slaves.  They are from Africa and got their name by hitching rides to the New World aboard Negro slave ships from West Africa (From Wikipedia link).  These guys are camera shy but are brave enough to jump on and run up your leg.  I was cleaning up the room downstairs and moved a ladder.  This guy jumped from the ground to my leg and started crawling up to my shorts.  Weirdest feeling ever!  I put my hands around my leg and shorts and started shaking my leg until he jumped off.  They're harmless but it was a pretty funny sight as I'm trying to get him off of me.  

We have the standard gecko's too.  They are really good to have in the house since they eat many bad bugs.  I read a local forum the other day about them and a person new to the island was asking how to get rid of them.  The responses were telling the guy to leave them and that you'd have far more unwanted guests without them.  My favorite response in the forum was, "I have many gecko's in my house that keep the mosquito volume down.  One even saved me 15% on my auto insurance."  We have one in each corner of the living room and many outside.  

Termites!  Yes we have them which is another reason why wood is not a good exterior building material.  The first picture below shows the tubes they create along a walkway or on trees.  When you break them open you'll find a termite highway going in both directions.  I clear one of these off the path during my morning walk and it will be rebuilt in a day or two.  

The second picture is a termite nest in a tree.  These are about the size of a large beach ball and very hard.  The hurricane knocked many down and broke them apart but I forgot to take pictures of the insides.  Basically they have many curved paths inside that don't appear to have a structure like an ant mound, but I may be wrong.  The tree itself is locally called a tourist tree because it's thin bark is red and peels like a sun burnt tourist.  

This is a large Caterpillar that I believe is a  Pseudosphinx tetrio.  It lives on the frangipani tree.  The caterpillars typically eat all of the leaves on the tree, but we're told this is a good symbiotic relationship.  The leaves of the frangipani typically fall off in the cooler weather and since we don't have cooler weather, the caterpillars do the job.  They will completely clean off a tree in a few weeks, but wait a bit and the leaves come back.  I've searched on the surrounding trees for the pupa and would love to see the moth when it emerges. 

We have some tiny scorpions on the island that are not dangerous.  What I learned from working at the arthropod exhibit at the Oregon zoo years ago is the claws tell the story.  If the claws are large then the scorpion uses them to rip apart their prey, and only have the sting of a bee or less.  If the claws are long and slender then they use their stinger to subdue their prey and can hurt or kill a human. 

We have really cool millipedes here.  There's the larger black African type as in the picture below that can have a body diameter close to a dime.  We also the smaller black and yellow type that roam the streets and try to get into the house.   

La Cucaracha! Yep, We've got em.  So far we've seen them mainly outside in the rain forest but occasionally you'll find one in the house.  This one is about 1.5" long. 

We have the typical wasps here.  I have a coconut palm in a bucket of water getting ready to plant and the wasps have been coming by to get a drink.  I've been knocking them down and the black ants have been attacking and killing them.  You may need to zoom in to the picture below to see the ants devouring the wasps. 

Here's a few of the really cool spiders we have.  The first picture is a spider in the middle of a 6 foot web.  I was walking our property and almost walked into it.  The third picture has an amazing abdomen.  My Audubon society arthropod book is still in the container so I can't look up the names.  Leave a comment if you know the names of anything I can't identify. 

The rest of the bugs are various things I've seen.  

Pretty cool blue bee.

We also have deer that steal fruits and vegetables from gardens.  We saw some huge bulls on Mahogany drive.  

Homo sapians.  We're told that after the hurricanes last year the human population is down to 35,000 from the 50,000 on St Croix.  Denise and I added two to the count and are not leaving.  Below is our friend and neighbor Gerry enjoying lunch with us at Off the Wall during Sahmie's visit.  We had a good time while she was here and now she's back home to the Seattle rain.

This is a long post so thanks for sticking around. 

Denise and I went driving around Salt River bay yesterday to the kayak tour locations to see if they had any used ones for sale.  We ran across some people at the Christopher Columbus landing site as they were setting a dumpster.  We stopped and asked if they were in need of any volunteers.  They were so we spent four hours today with a group of people cleaning up the beach.  We had a great time and had about 75% fill on the dumpster.  The hurricanes deposited most of the large debris but there were plenty of beer bottles, cans and water bottles.  Our property is the notch on the right side of the hill in the background. 

I've been asked how big St Croix is compared to where we move from.   I took a screen capture from Google Earth at the same eye altitude and put them together.  For those of you who know the Portland/Vancouver area you'll see the size our little island. 

That's all for now. 

Kevin & Denise