Story Time!

For those who don't know this about me, my personal menagerie consists of two leopard geckos (JD and Kahlua) and a gray tree frog (Cricket). Their diets consist of all sorts of creepy crawlies, but Cricket dines almost exclusively on crickets. (Forgive me for the slightly macabre moniker. He's named for the sound he makes, not his diet.) JD is getting up there in years and is essentially blind, so he is limited to food that can't move very far and that unfortunately rules out live crickets unless they are missing significant limbs. On the other hand, Kahlua's greatest joy in life is chasing and catching crickets.  He LOVES it.

Moving on - On Saturday I bought some more crickets for Cricket.  I put a few in his tank, threw a couple in with Kahlua for a treat, and left the rest in their own little house. Usually they are pretty quiet bugs but for some reason JUST ONE of them has been making a nonstop racket for the past three days. Sunday night I got fed up and dumped the whole lot into the tanks because I couldn't tell WHICH one was chirping relentlessly. Thought my problem was solved. 

Two days later, I came home from my house-sitting, walked into my room, and IT'S STILL CHIRPING. I looked in Cricket's tank and could see one little bugger left, hiding in the corner washing its face. It was time to do something proactive about this problem.  I grabbed the small perching stick from the corner of the tank and gently goaded the cricket into hopping closer... closer... closer... until it got within C's eyesight and BAM. Problem solved. I left happily to tell my dad of my success.

Twenty minutes later I came back into my room and nearly had a brain aneurism because OH MY GOD THERE IS STILL CHIRPING.

At this point the previous tactic won't work because the frog has had its fill for the night and is being picky, so I now have to corner this infuriating cricket, catch it, and put it in Kahlua's tank so HE can destroy it for me. In the process of doing so it nearly escaped, so what followed was thirty panicked seconds of trying to recapture the damn thing because if it had gotten loose in my room to chirp all night I would have had to kill myself. (not really).

I finally grabbed it by one leg, practically hurled it into K's tank, and closed the lid. 


I did not exactly WITNESS what followed, but I did hear a very telling *pounce-munch-crunch* from that general direction.

GOOD BOY KAHLUA.

Of course, it just occurred to me that I could have saved a lot of trouble just by killing it myself but I would hate to rob Kahlua of the joy of hunting and destroying a fellow living thing.

Seriously... that gecko is fierce. 

He's bigger now - this was when I first got him 1.5 years ago!

The end.