Natural Pest Control

I wasn’t initially planning on showing the pictures I’m about to show, figuring many of you might be a tad squeamish about these sorts of things.

However, based on some of the reactions to a post a while back about my deck geckos and to last week’s post about crabs in my house, reactions I’d describe as morbidly curious, I thought, “What the heck? Let’s have a little Animal Planet, right here on An Island Mom.”

If you are not into the whole circle of life thing so much, or if you grow faint or nauseous at the sight of lizards or roaches, look away now. Look far, far away.

But for those of you who can’t help yourselves, read on.

First, however, allow me a word about roaches in the South for my Yankee friends.

In the South, the terminology varies a bit.

Sophisticated individuals and those who’ve soundly rejected the idea of The Fall call them Palmetto bugs.

The bourgeois and those who have some semblance of decorum call them water bugs.

People like me, from entirely dubious origins, call them roaches or cockroaches.

My larger point, however, is this. In the North, it is entirely possible to live perhaps your whole life and never see a roach, certainly not in your own home.

In large parts of the South, it simply can’t be done. Trust me, I’ve tried. Cleanliness certainly helps, as do good pest control products or a good pest control service. But these are reduction measures, not elimination ones. Never seeing a roach in my neck of the woods is like never seeing an ant or a spider in the North; sightings can be rare, but it’s virtually impossible to make them nonexistent.

I have made my peace with this, because living on an island in the Carolinas has a million wonderful things to offer for every roach that has ever crossed my path.

But nothing changes the fact that they are nasty, regardless of nomenclature and whether they’re in your house or just out on your deck.

Sidenote: LCB once knew someone who ate cockroaches when dared. Had I ever witnessed this, I feel sure that I would have auto-puked. I am thankful and proud to report that the roach consumptions did not take place on Carolina soil, nor was the roach-eater a Carolinian. I’m also pointing this out so that all my friends from Carolina won’t drive themselves to madness trying to figure out which of our mutual acquaintances practiced something this obscene. To my knowledge, anyway, none of them have.

So, all that hoopla is leading up to me showing you what I found on my deck recently.

Yes, ma’am, that’s a gecko eating a roach. (Technically, I think the gecko is a Carolina anole, but the term “gecko” is more succinct and universally recognized. And this is, in fact, not Animal Planet.)

And there it is again.

Now, how about a picture of my dog sitting on my deck eating a water snake?

Just kidding. If that had happened, I think I’d have auto-fled back to Chicago.