Tesoro Verde has been our home for a few years now so Heather and myself are getting fairly well aquainted with the resident wildlife. That said, the hillside that we live on still has plenty of secrets to discover, and we love having our daily tasks interupted by what we term a “wildlife moment”, when we get to share one of those secrets. It’s rare that a day will include more than one new discovery so Tuesday this week was a day to mark in the diary as we had three new sightings to record. First off was the little gekko that quite literally crawled out of the woodwork as Jim and Danny were working on the new roof for the Bamboo Bothy. Strictly speaking that should read “crawled out of the bamboo work”! As you can see from the photo he’s a colourful fellow and we are sure he belongs with the Least Gekkos although we can’t decide on a specific species. It’s between Sphaerodactylus lineolatus, homolepis or possibly argus, any gekko experts out there?

At least we managed to narrow down the choices for our four legged friend, for the other two we are open to suggestions. First off is an insect or more correctly, lots of insects which we noticed gathered en mass on a tree near where we were working that day. Shiney metalic green as you can see and happy in their own company but what are they? The last and strangest question mark is a fungus. We noticed it on the ground in the bamboo forest where from a distance we thought it was a flower. It’s not obvious from the photo that they (there were three examples close together) are formed in an open cage like structure and they were all connected to the white root network you can see in the soil. More difficult to tell is that they all smelled strongly of feces! Answers on a postcard to ……And for those who are wondering, yes we did manage to get a little work done that day too!!