This morning we were enjoying the screened porch and watching the Tour de France on the laptop, when Donna noticed something moving in her peripheral vision. When she saw what it was she jumped up. I turned to see what she saw and it was a giant gecko (or maybe a skink)1 crawling along on the screening, inside the porch.
It was requested that I remove the offending reptile. I went out to the garage and grabbed a pair of work gloves, a one quart pitcher (normally used to water plants) and a clipboard. My plan was to corner the sucker, force it into the pitcher, cover the top with the clipboard and escort this huge, Godzilla-like, beast outside.
I have exaggerated the size a bit, but this thing was more than twice the size of any we have seen around here before. It was probably 6-1/2 to 7 inches long, tip to tail, and it had a body diameter about the size of a Marks-A-lot.
After a couple of misses trying to get the lizard into the pitcher it became clear I needed something with sharp corners, not something round, because it kept evading me by slipping between the lip of the pitcher and the screen. Back inside. This time I returned with a rectangular piece of Tupperware. On my first attempt I almost had him (or her) but then he (or she) abandoned the screen and took to running along the floor hugging the back wall.
I side stepped around it and opened the door to the porch. I tip-toed back around where it was hiding, under the table that holds the portable gas grill, came at it from that direction, hoping to force it outside. We chased each other back and forth a couple of times until, surprisingly, it climbed the wall and ducked under the wood wall that closes the porch off from the old roof line.
As yet, our enormous lizard interloper has not reappeared.