Friday Finding

The lizards over here at Casa Lagarto are not holding up their end of the bargain.

See, we have a lot of lizards here at the Casa.  Chameleons and geckos and skinks…and a truly shivery nekkid-looking thing that bears more of a resemblance to a snake than one would think would be quite safe for a lizard.  Other than the nekkid-looking thing, I am quite happy for the lizards to hang out here. (As long as they stay outside.  That’s part of the deal.)

Lizards are good for eating bugs.  And bugs…well, you know.

Oh, sure.  There’s that cycle of life thing and the food chain and all that.  But bugs, to me, are kind of like the garbage dump.  We all know we have to have them, “but not in my backyard.”  (And the garbage dump doesn’t generally display the vampire tendencies of the mosquitoes.  So there’s that.)

But lately, we’ve had an awful lot of grasshoppers.  And not just any grasshoppers, mind you, but the Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers–otherwise known as the Georgia Thumper.  These things are huge.

You want to see a picture?  Click here for a shot taken by Scattergun UK and posted on Flickr.

That shot doesn’t provide any reference point as to size, but take it from me.  They are HUGE.  Like, I’m not sure a fight between Godzilla and a Grasshopper in a Japanese horror movie would end with Godzilla taking home the title.

(Okay, okay.  They are not that huge.  But they are bugs!  It adds a certain ick factor.)

And they are decimating the plants.  The leaves on my canna lilies are all raggedy-looking.  I think they’ve started in on the hydrangea, and I knocked one out of the camphor tree yesterday.

There doesn’t seem to be anything you can spray to control them.  You’ve got to take them out one at a time. My husband is on grasshopper patrol.  But, you know, you can’t spend all day lying in wait for insects.

And I would have thought that the lizards would have done more to prevent this problem.

I’m disappointed in them.