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Published: November 22nd 2007
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We are not the sole occupants of our apartment. We share the space with some local tenants. One of the less appealing was a 12 cm (5 inch) centipede we found crawling on the stairs shortly after we arrived. After Betsy snapped a couple of mugshots, I caught it in a yogurt container and released it outside.
More charming are the geckos. They are up to 10 cm (4 inches) long and have special hairs on their feet that permit them to adhere firmly to surfaces, so you’re just as likely to find them on the walls as on the ceiling. I’m told that these geckos have break-away tails. This is a defense mechanism. If a predator grabs the tail, it will snap off and start wiggling, distracting the predator while the business end of the gecko makes a getaway. I believe they re-grow their tails. What’s most interesting about these critters, though, is their appearance. They’re translucent, so you can sort of see their insides.
We haven’t seen our gecko guests in a while. We're uncertain what happened to them, but we’re blaming the neighbor’s cat, Nuki. That she owns the place goes without saying: she’s a cat.
When we arrived, the apartment had been shut up for a while and there were several geckos. It was the end of summer and very hot, so we left the windows open to cool off the place, which gave the cat access. In less than a month we stopped seeing geckos. I don’t like cats, so I blamed Nuki. To get a less biased opinion, we asked Amots. He said that cats do indeed attack and kill geckos. (Nuki is actually a charming and elegant cat, as her picture suggests, and I like her as much as I can like a cat.)
I believe that the Middle East is where house cats were domesticated. There certainly are a lot of them in Haifa, mostly feral. The problem is that people feel sorry for them and feed them. You can walk almost anywhere in the city and see food that people have left out on the sidewalk, on stoops, and under shrubbery. Sometimes it’s cat food, but more often it’s prepared food in plastic containers or simply dumped on the ground. The cats do what cats do: they eat and reproduce. So the city is overrun with scrawny, dirty cats.
(Bad as the problem is here, it is much worse in Jerusalem.)
There are also a variety of other wild mammals that don't have access to our apartment. The wadis (dry creek gulches) are home to jackals, a Middle Eastern version of a coyote. (Both jackals and coyotes are in the genus Canis.) We know they’re here because we frequently hear them howling at night. Wild pigs are here too. They're native, not feral. A few nights ago I heard rustling outside the window. When I looked out I saw a couple of these pigs moving through the underbrush in the vacant lot next door. About as big as a medium sized dog, they were compact, round, muscular creatures covered with chestnut brown fur. More than anything they give the impression of a really solidly built animal. They made muffled oinking noises as they passed by.
Some of the birds here are really beautiful. The real charmers are the Palestine sunbirds. A little bit bigger than a hummingbird, the males are an iridescent purple-blue when the sun strikes them. Females are drab brown. The males are very territorial. They flit around the yard, sipping nectar from long-throated flowers
and chasing each other. Betsy took these pictures. I couldn't choose among them, so I included them all.
We also have blackbirds. You know, the ones of the 4 and 20 pie fame, though no one here seems to dine on them. These birds were regular visitors to our yard, where they tore up the lawn searching for the fat scarab beetle grubs that the gardener allowed to infest our lawn. Apparently this form of biological control is not particularly effective: based on the condition of the grass, it's clear that the grubs got ahead of the birds. So about two weeks ago we sprinkled poison on the lawn to kill the grubs. Blackbirds don't frequent our yard anymore, which I take as a good sign. The grubs are dead. We used Dursban, which the EPA has banned for household use in the US. I don’t walk barefoot on the lawn anymore.
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