Poison Ivy...itch, itch, itch

“You're gonna need an ocean … of calamine lotion.

You'll be scratching like a hound

The minute you start to mess around with …

Poison ivy.”

The Poison Ivy song – the Coasters

With all of our complaints and comments about the natural hazards in Australia (and Lord knows there are many), we tend to forget that we've got a few around here, too. With all the rain and humidity, miserable mosquitoes that carry the West Nile Virus have been thick and hungry. Black flies and no see 'ems at this time of year can drive you crazy. Ticks which carry Lyme Disease are everywhere. All of these you can see and avoid with insect repellent if you're diligent.

Poison ivy, though, is pretty sneaky and insidious. It kind of lies in wait in forests, along the roadside, stretching and crawling along old stonewalls, and rearing its shiny green leaves near ripening blackberry bushes. It waits and waits until an unwitting person, like me for instance, brushes against its leaves with a sandaled foot or bare arm and WHAM … a couple days later you're itching like crazy. Actually, the plant resin can remain on your clothes or on your dog's fur and get you days after. We learned this rhyme as kids: “Leaves of three … let it be.”

One of the rites of summer as a child involved at least one major bout with poison ivy that required slathering on calamine lotion and listening to our moms warn us not to scratch. Right … as if we could resist scratching till we were raw … and even after scratching, the itch still persisted and nearly drove us crazy. It wasn't pretty: blisters and ooze between our toes and fingers, on our legs and arms; no body surface or orifice was safe.

So, why do I mention this? Yes, you guessed it. I've got poison ivy. I traipsed off the road to get a photo of a stonewall and … well, let's just say I'm itchin'.

Leave it to the Birds

There's animalification, zoomorphism, personification, anthromorphization and… I've got a new one for you … avimorphism … ascribing bird characteristics to humans, usually in the form of similes. It's a new word. I just coined it.  

You know what I mean … if you call someone a magpie, it connotes that that person is a gossip or prone to excessive chat. In Australia, if you're called a “galah”, it means you're a stupid, dull-witted person. Actually, we kind of liked the look of galahs … pink and white cockatoos. We never got the chance to evaluate their intelligence level, but we assume someone has. If not a gallah, perhaps they'd call you a birdbrain or a booby (named “bobo” by the Spanish, meaning fool).

We tend to refer to lawyers as vultures, circing the dead, so they can eat the remains. There are probably other descriptive and more derogatory terms for lawyers, but vulture works.

You can be “proud as a peacock” when you strut your stuff or “graceful as a swan”.

“Bald as a coot” and “naked as a jaybird” or as the Brits say “naked as a robin”. As far as I can tell, coots aren't bald. They may look it, but they're not. Jaybirds have lovely blue and grey feathers and robins aren't naked at all.

There are old “crows” and someone can be “silly as a goose”. Not that I especially like crows, but I'm not sure I've ever seen an old one. It's hard to determine their age at all. As far as geese go, “silly” is not the adjective I would have chosen to describe them, nor the people that they're silly as. Maybe I would have said “honked as a goose”, but I'm not sure what that would mean any more than “silly” … where do you suppose that came from? I do, unfortunately, get that distinctly extinct feeling when I hear “dead as a dodo” though.

I'm more inclined to use the positive attributes of our feathered friends. Being on the boat, we many times feel we're “free as a bird” and when we congregate with other folks who are like-minded, we consider them “birds of a feather”. I think the captain might be wise as an owl (I'll get extra credits for saying that) except when he's driving and gets cut off and “flips someone the bird”. Hmmm...I guess that's a whole other discussion. Makes me want to stick my head in the sand.

Lizards We Have Known

 

First of all, let me make it clear from the get-go, I do not particularly like lizards nor any other type of creepy-crawler, but we have seen many and diverse lizard species, so I thought I'd share. That said, the Geico gecko is kind of cute and likeable. I cut out a pic of him one morning from the newspaper and positioned him on David's place mat with his morning coffee. I show my love in odd and varied ways.

Back to the subject at hand, lizards. When we first sailed into the Turks and Caicos on our way to the Caribbean, we witnessed a lizard fight. It looked amazingly like Godzilla Meets Godzilla 2, but in miniature. A knowing museum docent informed us that this was the local anole species and males often fought for territory in this manner. He also said that every island in the Carib had a different anole species. I decided I'd try to photograph as many as I could. Why not? … it's digital photography.

I learned the difference between geckos and anoles. Anoles have dewlaps, those inflatable, cartilagenous, chin gear things that get big when they're facing off over territory or trying to impress a potential mate. They're sometimes called chameleons because they can change color. They have little claws, so they're good climbers and they have detachable tails that grow back … just in case. Handy, huh? They're also day critters which makes them much easier to photograph.

Geckos are curious creatures. They're mostly nocturnal and have suction cups on their toes so climbing, even upside down, is a cinch. They're unique among lizards in that they chirp when they're chatting with their friends. Though they can't blink their eyes, they can lick their eyeballs. Now that's outstanding, don't you think? Better than detachable tails, I'd say. There are more species of geckos than any other lizard in the world … over 1500 worldwide. So many geckos, so little time.

Anoles are related to iguanas, of which we've seen quite a few. Though I'm not fond of anoles, they're small and usually innocuous, creeping about silently in the undergrowth or sunning themselves on rocks. Iguanas, on the other hand, are not small, nor are they innocuous and they're definitely extroverts. They come after you to say hello, get a snack, whatever. They chased me off the beach at Norman Cay in the Bahamas, charged after me for an apple in Bonaire, pooped on my head from the trees in Parque Bolivar, Guayaquil, Ecuador and startled us while swimming in the water in the Galapagos. Not my kind of lizard at all. In Fiji, I let a lizard-keeper at the zoo put rare banded iguana lizards on my shoulder and head. She thought it was cute. I hated it.

In the Southwest US, we saw all sorts of desert lizards, small and large, usually sunning themselves or scurrying for cover under rocks. They're not outgoing and can be photographed easily from a distance.

I liked the colorful whiptail lizards with their iridescent turquoise banding that we saw in Bonaire. They were friendly enough and even shared an apple with David. He was okay with it … they just take little bites.

We saw goannas, a kind of monitor lizard, in Australia. I didn't feel like getting all that close and the photographs I took were more akin to those blurred photos of the Loch Ness monster and Sasquatch that you see from time to time.

Back to Geico's personable mascot, because as a marketer, I think this has been a good ad campaign. People mispronounced “Geico” and said “gecko”, so the marketing folk went with it. The Geico gecko has no name, just Geico gecko. He's a gold dust day gecko with a slight Cockney accent which has morphed over the past decade from the voice of Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) to the current voice of comedian Jake Wood. How's that for lizard-ology?