Born free. Small amphibians fight for their right to be green.
Kids.
Kids want critters in the house. As a child, I chose the common toad as my critter of choice to stuff in a jar.
More frog teeter trickled across my palm as a 8 year old than as an adult with three infants combined.
My eight year old son brought back a boatload of anoles (your common outdoor lizard) with us from Florida on Spring Break.
They went straight in the tank with our tortoise and turned brown as pine bark — because that’s what they lived on. Well, coconut bark. They existed on that and water for we hadn’t managed to catch any crickets in two weeks.
Today before school my son said, “I’m going to let my people go.”
Not really, but it was rather biblical. Freeing the captives from the desert into a land flowing with crickets.
So today after school, we set out to free five anoles.
The Beast — or one of them.
I couldn’t do it. It freaked me out. They bite. Now they might have been so weakened they couldn’t bite a mini-marshmallow or they could have been really cranky and crank out a nasty flesh wound.
What to do?
What would Ross Allen do? What would the Crocodile Hunter have done?
What would the Swamp People do? (Oh yeah, they’d just pull out a pistol. I hate that show and every male in my house LOVES it.)
I channeled my inner reptile wrangler and grabbed a…
Yes, it might look like a common athletic sock but in reality it’s a high tech tool of the anole wrangler.
Anole Whisperers around here? Heck no.
We take care of business.
They all are roaming free as we speak. And turning green.
Well, once they make it off the driveway.
What was your critter of choice?
