I’m sure mostly everyone these days feels like they’ve wandered into The Twilight Zone. But it’s business-as-usual in the animal world.
The noise from our personal plague of crickets is finally starting to die down, as we’ve recovered a lot of them and fed them to a most obliging Henry. I enjoyed the first real night of sleep I’ve had in weeks.
Well, at least I was enjoying it, until we were woken up at 5 o’clock in the morning by a pair of horny dinosaurs. Yep, it’s alligator mating season across the Deep South, and particularly in the hedge along the water by our house. I’m so glad I started a blog so I can look back and remember how truly bizarre these days were.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard alligator mating calls before, but they will simultaneously freak you out and amuse you. Alligators spend most of the year lurking about the swamps in stealthy silence. They can sit quietly at the bottom of a pond for hours at a time. But when they are feeling amorous, they are louder than a Latin American soap opera.
Days of Sunshine 
Wow!!!!! It sounds like something out of Jurassic Park (which our boys watch almost once a week LOL).
Good grief that’s just a heck of a lot of craziness to deal with… I’m glad the crickets have died down some, but those alligator sounds are creepy!!
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So we were really thinking of buying our son a bearded dragon, but it just sounds so difficult – especially the recent cricket issue! I told him about what y’all are going through, and how I was planning on buying crickets in bulk, too, because it just made more sense, but I didn’t think about the sounds they’d make all night – or them getting out!
He’s thinking he wants a kitten now LOL… We’ll see though. He was really set on a bearded dragon!
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So bearded dragons are totally awesome pets, don’t let our antics discourage you!
They are very gentle and loving and intelligent. And this cricket problem would not have been an issue if we had not put the kid in charge of the terrarium. The only real problem with beardies is that they can make a break for it really fast when they are young. Sometimes little kids don’t appreciate that. But they do make harnesses and leashes for them.
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Ok 😀 it just sounds so crazy LOL I’ll keep researching about them, too. That was why we liked them, the prospect of their demeanor being so good for pre-teens to raise! But we’re cat people, too, all of our cats have passed already, and I was going to make the kids wait a few years until our little ones are older (babies/toddlers and kittens just don’t mix in my opinion). So I thought this was the perfect timing to allow him to get a lizard – to let it get a little older, too, before having to deal with a kitten in the house.
We’d definitely utilize the harness/leash though! And our oldest has a really big room, so we’d probably make it to where he could only have him in there, even on the leash – never off when out. The younger ones would only be able to watch him when he’d be inside his enclosure, but they’d still love it I think!
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They are really adorable!
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If you get one, I have to say, I highly recommend getting them the berry salad dressing they sell. These guys love berries so much it’s hilarious.
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I laughed so hard when reading that when you wrote about it! 😀 We would definitely get it, and thank you for writing!
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Absolutely amazing, and quite eerie to hear in person. I won’t forget the morning my daughter and I first heard a gator bellow echoning across the Okefenokee Swampa few years back.
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It has taken me a couple years to get used to the sounds of the jungle. For weeks after we moved to Florida, I was convinced we had monkeys outside at night. (And apparently in some places they do have feral monkey colonies.) Finally figured it was barred owls. If we ever went camping here, I think I might be awake all night long just wondering what’s lurking outside the tent.
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