Wildlife Update

The little songbirds that I set free — those that survived — seem to have set up house in the trees along the street next to my garden and are twittering happily.

The snail invasion continues apace. If I look, I can always find one or two stuck to a wall or something. One was making its way across my walk the other night and I stepped on it in the dark... sickening sound like stepping on your glasses. Now I know to keep an eye out for them. Surpringly the kitties leave them alone...

...unlike the lovebirds, who still get occasional furry lightning strikes. The pair pretty much stay up inside their penthouse and only come out when they know the coast is clear, and head for safety at the first sign of movement outside.

The chingchoks haven't fared as well. Not one of the tiny green geckos has been seen in over a week as the cats have nabbed them all, it seems. However, there is still a large Tookeh lizard over near my bedroom window who makes a "tookeh" bullfrog sound at night.

There are a whole lot of butterflies around my house. There are boring small white ones, some big black ones, and a husband/wife team that look like Monarch butterflies, but more brown than orange, who dance through the air together all over the place. I never see one without the other. Maybe in keeping with my lovebirds, I shall name them loverflies. There are giant tan and white moths too. The cats do like those and have gotten really good at leaping and snagging them out of the air. There are lots of other color butterflies that I can't see at the moment to describe... but they are out there.

There are also hummingbirds who fellate the flowers on my property. Every once in a while, they take the shortcut through my office window, past my head, and out the patio door, making me dive for cover each time, as a friendly hummingbird and a menacing 3-inch long bumblebee look quite similar to my entomophobic eye.

A large cat — I think it is the neighbor's — comes over the wall from time to time and sets up a howling as he paces my property. If it wasn't a boy, I would be certain the thing was in heat. He stays in the periphery so he is rarely seen... but he hides out, obscured in the bushes and makes a racket. I've got a collection of pebbles next to my desk so that when I hear him, I can chuck some in his direction, and the noise usually scares him back over to his native side of the wall.

A friend — Geoff actually — remarked that he didn't like cats because they really fuck with the wildlife population in the neighborhood. He's right. Unfortunately, I'm attached to my hairy little trio, and besides: Thailand has more wildlife per square meter than another other country on the planet... those species who don't make it in my tiny little slice of Thailand are doing quite fine beyond my property's borders.