Bugs and beasts
You can't live in Mexico and ignore them
Arriving at Culiacán airport in the state of Sinaloa in the 1990s. A billion zillion mosquitoes, that made us run for our lives to the car. Seated inside gasping as the bugs batted and bumped off the windows, aggressive and voracious.
Later, a small plane flying lazily over the town spraying the mosquitoes and us with something unspeakable.
That was then, now it’s prohibited…
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I hardly dare write this but the scorpions seem to have scarpered. I haven’t seen one since February. I can’t believe it, especially as I used to have so many, and most of them seemed to arrive in my bathroom, before taking up residence on the ceiling right above my bed.
A likely explanation is the presence of the besuconas, or geckos, who have set up shop behind my pictures and the modem. They have a preference for scorpions, black widow spiders and cockroaches and I welcome their skills. They are like a sort of scorpion police patrol, a brilliant natural way of getting rid of unwelcome visitors.
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A miniature spider, a jumping spider. Black and ready to jump out of reach. Innocuous enough but if one spends the night in bed with you, you wake up with bites that itch for months, leaving scars that fade away very slowly, only over time.
Most attractive.
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Sitting on my terrace one day reading, out of the corner of my eye I saw something fall to the ground, off the roof. When I got up to see what was going on I saw a snake slithering through the grass in hot pursuit of a terrified squeaking mouse. The snake caught and swallowed the poor little thing in one easy mouthful right in front of me.
I wasn’t entirely happy about either the snake or the mouse, so close to me, busy outside the window of my bedroom upstairs where the chase began. Both snakes and mice like coming into houses…
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At night, cats howl, cacomixtles run across the roof above me lifting the tiles to reveal something juicy to eat, letting the tile fall noisily back out-of-place, the occasional mapache (racoon) crashes about frightening my dog, tlacuaches (opossums) silently hunt, owls noisily hoot… who knows what all the insects do while I sleep…
Excellent word pictures! We have two homes in very different climate zones, so I can add gopher, constrictor, and green snakes, bees and wasps, red foxes, autonomous dogs, skunks, frogs, crabs, bats, grasshoppers of many types, centipedes, and hawks that excite our dogs.
Living in rural México is like living in a zoo! Or maybe just a reminder that we share the planet with many different species.
Speaking of scorpions, one of our dogs is a scorpion killer!
Another entertaining peek into the critters who share your life and garden, a vivid one! I love the gecko patrol. As a girl my family would visit Bahia San Carlos near Guaymas on the Sea of Cortez. I remember having to shake out shoes before putting them out because the scorpions liked to hide in them. We were focused on the underwater creatures and there were beauties.