The Lizard Backstory....

I see Susie has been posting about Wally the gold-dust day-gecko... so while she takes her evening shower I'll write a bit more.

Susie, the "mother of worms"

In fact, the whole shama adventure grew out of my seeing if I could train some of the gold-dust geckos who have been displacing the regular house geckos by being bigger, smarter, and - well- eating the others. But they do seem to have a lot more personality. So I originally got some live mealworms to see if I could train them. (the daygecks, not the worms)

the regular geckos are dumber too. Sue now uses tops at night

"Peeky" the first trained daygeck. Seen here peeking.

Chompy

Turns out that training day geckos isn't all that satisfying... I did train a number of them to run to my from their hiding places when I'd call "lizard want a worm?, but any more exotic behaviors just didn't materialize. Though they still know that trick, even if they haven't seen me in awhile. And actually, there was a brown anole "velociraptor" from outside who learned better just by watching, and when I'd say that he'd race from far away, climb the furniture, leap in my hand to grab the mealworm, then run back outside, so his IQ was presumably higher since I hadn't even tried to train him. There was also "Chompy" a green anole who would likewise come in and leap into my hand... this familiarity became unfortunate when I was doing an interview for an associate's security clearance and the interviewer had Chompy leap repeatedly on her face over the course of the interview. I suppose my saying "Chompy! No!" didn't help either, I made clear it wasn't a pet but just a lizard from the yard, but she was skeptical.

Anyhow, after failing to teach the lizards any tricks, Susie asked me what I'd do with the remaining live mealworms, so I said "I'm going to bond with a shama, like in the Cinderella disney cartoon where they land on your fingers and sing songs to you, and make you clothes and stuff.  And the making clothes thing is negotiable".  "How will you do that?" she asked. "I dunno, just go out in the backyard and throw mealworms up and down until some shama happens by". I said.

And that's more or less how I met Birdlet, and the whole shama drama escapades began. Little did I know what I was getting us into...