Sleeping, Hatching, Hopping, Dropping and Ready to Eat...

On my nightly rounds I discovered this rather large looking rock-with-a-face just sitting there in the middle of the Bromiliad! A toad it was, and a large one at that, and I think it is a Cane Toad since there are supposedly only two toads on the island - Cane and Crested, and the crested don't live above 200 feet (we are around 500). So I've photographed him multiple times and should relocate him a block or more away so he doesn't eat the coquis. Look at that face!

Besides hopping things there are dropping things in our yard. Besides coconuts (a near miss) there have been many crashing breadfruit, banana trees, Anons, oranges and this little treasure - Soursop or guanabana. Press the fruit through a sieve, take the gooey/creamy white pile and mix it with a little sugar, water and milk and stick it in the freezer (or add ice) and you have a delightfully refreshing drink. A nice alternative to orange juice (we are drinking several glasses a day and still have many many oranges)! (The Malta is there for effect.)

Here are a couple fruits from the yard - a guanabana and a corazon. When is an anon not an anon? When it is in Puerto Rico and it is called a corazon. I guess it looks like a heart. Anyway, it is our new favorite fruit. Inside it is white with lots of black seeds. You have to use a spoon to eat it right. Scoop the seedy part first savoring the pear-like sweat taste and save the grainy flesh around the skin for last. Jeff likes them cold and I am anti anything cold. At first I thought they were too sweet and now I climb not-so-big tree limbs when we can't reach them with the ladder!

Well we finally have a hatchling! It is a lovely little gecko still sporting a piece of eggshell on its head. It is the only one that has hatched so far, and as you can see it is quite small when compared to my grubby little gardener's finger.

When we were up inspecting our upper area, and trying to decide whether to keep letting horses up there or not (we decided not) a little round yellow fruit was sitting on the ground. Hmmmm, that looks like passion fruit I thought with the thought not being too far fetched since I had seen passion flower flowers on some of our endless vines. We opened it up, pressed it through the sieve and had another tangy juice to drink! We liked it soooo much we found a nursery near Cabo Rojo or Aquadilla (on the way back from diving) that had vines for $2 each. We bought 5 and put them along the chainlink fence on the upper and lower parts of the property. If vines are gonna cover the fence we might as well be able to harvest something! Oh, and passion fruit isn't passion fruit here - it is parcha! I just call it yummy and cool looking.

Here's a little coqui frog posing on a diffenbachia plant at night. And of course the little baby gecko. And speaking of geckos - they are my new favorite subject to photograph now that I have figured out that they snooze in the ginger flowers at night. Almost every ginger flower will have a sleeping gecko in it by dark. The flash will usually get an eye open but not always. They don't seem to like the red flowers though - that would be the nicest shot. I look for a tail or a little head peaking out of a blossom.

I can find them sleeping on all kinds of leaves usually lined up with the ribline. They look very relaxed.

This one is my favorite - "gecko in a deep snooze."

What's In the Lightswitch?

The other day I saw a line of ants crawling up the wall going in to and out of the light switch on the porch. My curiosity was peaked and I had to take the light switch cover off and see what these damn ants were up to.

Closer inspection revealed eggs and lots of them. Probably 20 or so! What kind of eggs are they and how did they get there?

One of the eggs was broken and that's why the ants were in there. We took the eggs out and put them in a jar. They have have not hatched but we believe they are gecko eggs. We have tons of geckos around.

Mas Frutas, Odd Pod and Things That Sing in the Night

...but first we have the fruit line-up - on your left we've got toronja (we trade with the neighbor lady Amparo - she is on lipitor and can't eat grapefruit), then a chinoja (grapefruit-orange cross and very good for juice), then a sunburned orange (very juicy), a non-sunburned orange and a lime. That is the citrus lineup - and not shown are the china agria (bitter orange - used for marinade and the leaves for tea) and lemons that overhang our driveway.


This next one is an anon - don't know which one, but it has weird skin-scales and turns bright pink when it is ripe! It took my eating a few before I could appreciate them - had to figure out the perfect time to harvest them. They are kind of like a custardy, grainy, sugary pear. I usually find pears a little too sweet but when you use a spoon to scoop this fruit it is is a real treat and is my new favorite (even more than guanabana)!

Here is today's harvest. We helped Amparo prune a grapefruit and she made us take a couple bags of them. The mango wood bowl on the left has oranges (chinas) in it, the dishwashing bin has more oranges and the bag on the right is even more oranges! In the kind-of middle is another pink anon, and behind it is a guanabana (soursop) that I like as a cooling drink. You press the white, fibrous pulp and seeds through a sieve and end up with a creamy white goo. Add sugar (soursop is tangy) and milk and a little coconut water and ice and you've got a creamy good tangy refreshment! There are a few platanos in the mix. Plantains and bananas are a whole other blog entry!

Well, we are clearing the hillside...at least making headway! Jeff goes through with the weedwhacker and I follow up with my pink plastic $1 rake (my craftsman and fiskars tools all break but not my $1 little pink rake) to pull grass and sticks into piles. Then I run into the zillion vines and hand pull those until the ground is basically bare (until it rains). I always have my hands in the dried grass and under sticks and things.
Since I am not photographing under water yet (don't know the area well enough to know what I want to photograph) I have taken on photographing - or trying to- the coqui frog! This is a difficult task because they are only out at night when it is dark! So I wander around in dense foliage that is shoulder high with a flashlight in one hand, a camera in the other listening for them and trying to spot them and then waiting for the breeze to stop moving the leaf they are on etc etc. It is hard! They pop about 3 feet when the light hits them, or they go deeper into little holes or under leaves or inside banana stumps These are some attempts. These frogs make huge sound but are very tiny. I was surprized they were so small!

In the morning I watch the big ball of a sun come up over the hill and drink my coffee out in front of the house watching and listening to the hills come alive! The roosters are ur ur uring, cows are talking and birds are out everywhere. This bird and its mate were up in one of our palms knocking the palm fruits off. I thought they were eating them but no...just picking them off and dropping them.

Another odd night time thing are the geckos. They sprawl out on top of leaves and snooze.

This odd pod is all over our hillside. It is a pretty little vine that smells like pepper when you touch the leaves and produces these pretty little orange globe-like fruits that pop open to reveal these little red bean looking things! These beans are really really sticky and exude a sticky substance. The ants love them and probably assist them in taking over the world!

This coqui was caught in the act as s/he bellowed out the cool coqui sound. Do a websearch on coqui frogs and you'll find a site that has recordings of all their sounds. Exactly what we fall asleep to each night!

So those are the ramblings for the evening. It is a good frog night since we got a little rain today! The Puerto Rican Screech owl is out there making its monkey sounds...the grasshoppers are going wild (haven't heard them like this before) and the coquis are superb. I can't wait to wake up and head for the hillside!