I don’t live alone, exactly. Besides two or three or four dogs, I’m completely surrounded by lizards at any given time. The inside of the house teems with cicaks and tokays. Skinks, chameleons and monitor lizards prowl the garden and the undercliff. I’d like to think there were some gliding lizards out there in the trees as well. It’s a herpetologist’s fantasy come true.
Ted the Tokay moved into my new house the same day I did. I paused in unpacking the kitchen to watch the newly hatched little lizard make its unsteady way along the counter. The house was barely finished — how had the precious egg remained hidden from 14 busy workmen? As I approached for a closer look, he danced up on his tiny feet and threatened me with an almost inaudible roar before starting the long and hazardous climb to the roof beams.
I didn’t see him again for about a year, though evidence of his presence was visible every morning on the same patio tile. (You may have noticed that tokays are very regular in their habits.) I frequently heard his repetitive call of “Toe – Kaaaay’” as he patrolled the house in the dark. Then I arrived home late one night to find that he had got himself thoroughly stuck on a piece of fly paper. The little house lizards often did this and were easy enough to free unharmed with a Q-Tip and some vegetable oil. But Ted was not content to wait for me to come home and release him. He’d thrashed around until he was wrapped up like an eccentric parcel, now firmly stuck to the counter.
His furious roars were a bit daunting. Tokays can deliver a nasty bite. But there was no choice, I couldn’t leave him there all night at the mercy of the ants. Ten tense and very messy minutes later Ted was free, hissing indignantly. He was completely covered in oil, and so was I.
According to Ron Lilley, my consulting herpetologist (reptile specialist), tokays are very territorial. “There is rarely more than one male tokay in a house or on a tree,” he notes. Only males make the distinctive call. Tokay couples share their space with immature young, but adult sons have to move on and establish their own territory. A healthy tokay can grow to 30 centimeters and continue decorating the same patch of floor for a couple of decades. That’s longer than most dogs and marriages last. Maybe we should be developing deeper relationships with our resident tokays, or at least progress to first-name terms.
In my previous house in the rice fields, I’d often been woken at night by what sounded like large mammals dancing on the roof beams and thundering around on the bedeg ceiling. I learned that tokays were the source of the nocturnal noises. They filled the hours of darkness by raiding rats’ nest, fighting with each other and perhaps engaging in tokay races with exciting prizes, none of which was very endearing at 4 o’clock.
Tokays are particularly attractive members of the Gecko family, sporting suits in stylish shades of blue with yellow or orange spots. They dine on insects and baby rodents (in England, Ron fed his pet tokay 20 newborn mice twice a week), which make them useful household members, and are in turn consumed by the Chinese as food or medicine. My father has a bottle of medicinal Chinese wine with a preserved tokay floating in it. He takes great pleasure in offering a glass to dinner guests. They always decline.
The more numerous but less dramatic cicak or common house lizard is probably the most widely distributed lizard in the world. In the absence of TV, Daisy the Dachshund watches them unblinkingly for hours as they patrol the kitchen wall at night, and has to be carried away protesting to her cushion at bed time.
Our ubiquitous cicak has become an exotic pet in Europe. Thousands are exported from Indonesia as pets every year. In England it’s become a popular hobby to breed them at home. Cicaks and skinks lose their tails when startled, a clever survival tactic that distracts predators long enough to allow an escape. Some varieties actually slip out of their skin when grabbed, undoubtedly disconcerting to the grabber who is left with a flaccid lizard-shaped wrapper but no lizard. Geckoes can’t blink, so they lick their own eyes to clean them. I am not making this up.
Ron says there may be something poisonous about cicaks, because cats that eat them invariably vomit them straight back up again. He claims they’ve adapted remarkably well to city life in Indonesia. He’s seen the little forest animals clinging to the outside of high rise buildings in Jakarta, presumably feasting on high-flying bugs.
It’s wonderful to have your own herpetologist. Ron is a gold mine of information about the common lizards I’ve spotted in my house and garden, but I suspect that his real passion is snakes. He grows quite tender when he talks about them. Over the past two weeks he’s flushed several young cobras from near his house and relocated them away from habitation, to the relief of his less admiring family. “Cobras are so misunderstood,” he mourns.
He grieves that people kill snakes automatically, when most are harmless. Balinese snakes are not aggressive as a rule and seldom bite unless cornered or threatened. If you have a snake or exotic lizard in your house or garden, you may call Ron for advice at 0361 287111. If you live in the Sanur area he may even come and deal with it himself.
Meanwhile, commune with your resident tokay. You never know, he could be with you for a long, long time.
