March-29-2009

DEATH in Our Frontyard


Once in a while we would hear tokay at night. Sometimes we were worried as the noise seemed very near — as if the thing were just one step from our living room. There were a few nights last week that we heard the noise of this big gecko all through the night till dawn.

"Toog-gae, toog-gae, toog....gae...

Toog-gae, toog-gae, toog....gae...

Toog-gae, toog-gae, toog...gae..."

and...

"Grrrrr....... grrrrrrr...."

Photo on the left was from Wikipedia.

We call it toog-gae in Thai, just like the sound it makes.  The real thing could be more colorful than the one in this pic.

You might want to read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gekko_gecko

The sound it has on this page at Wikipedia was not the same as what we heard.

I do not live in or near any jungles. My house is in a townhouse complex in Bangna, which is a part of the (overcrowded and polluted) great metropolitan of Bangkok.

Nevertheless in every rainy season we would hear that snakes and pythons invaded some people's houses in our neighborhood and the owners of these houses had to call for help to capture the snakes. We also often see toads flat and dried dead on the streets after they were run over by cars or trucks...

It is yucky. No wonder in the tropics people would take off their shoes before they enter any house.

I am not used to animals. Imagine how shocked I was when I saw a bloated, unmoved toad with a tokay under it and in my own front yard...!

What if they were still alive and jump at me...?!?!

I watched from afar, observed for a while.... When I was sure they would not move I told my son to get his Iphone.

We took some pics.

Soon we were completely sure that they were 100% dead as nothing moved at all — except the ants around them.

I did not have the nerve to get closer to the bodies.

Too bad the Iphone could not zoom when taking pictures.

These are what I got:







The colors on the tokay were fading and they faded fast.

I sprayed some insecticide to get rid of the ants.

We left the corpses there for two more days as none of us were brave enough to put them away...

When the ironing lady came with our clothes she offered to pick them up ( thank heaven, not barehanded ! ) and put them in a plastic bag and then into the garbage can.

Actually I had wanted to see what they would turn into after a few more days under hours of mid-summer heat under the tropical sun.

Oh well... Maybe it was a bad idea.

There has been no Tokay noise since the death of it. I wonder how they fought, who was the first to be injured,  and  whose poison or whose fatal bites caused the first death.

The nights are now quiet.

Somehow we cannot help missing the (annoying) Tokay noise.


Kanda