A gecko has moved into my mailbox. I don’t know whether he is a local, or an invasive species, but he is one of many on my porch. I call them “the night shift”, because they knock off during the day, leaving the porch to the anoles and the curlytails. Both are also imports, the native Carolina anole of my childhood has disappeared, pushed out of his prime suburban habitat by these more aggressive and agile competitors. They still exist out in the woods, but the choice territory (with plenty of sunlit horizontal surfaces for dominance strutting and sexual display) has been taken over by the illegal aliens. That seems to be the limiting resource.

Some of the anoles have a yellow and brown stripe down their backs, looking exactly like a chipmunk’s. I don’t know if that is just a coincidence, or if it plays some kind of camouflage function. There are no chipmunks in Florida, at least not south of Tampa.

But at night, the geckos come out, they hunt in darkness and my porch light attracts bugs by the million. They patrol the porch and occasionally get into the house. I try to catch them and let them go outside, but they are masters of concealment. I usually find them mummified, months later when I’m cleaning house.

But one has moved into my mailbox. When I check my mail during the day I usually run into him, and for a moment, we startle each other. But lately, we’ve gotten used to one another. I don’t mind him moving in, and I like to think he no longer minds my peering and groping into his daytime hideout.

My gecko is about 5 inches long, fat and healthy. He (I have no idea what ‘his’ sex is!) is quick and active, his skin a mottled gray and covered with little bumps instead of scales. He looks nothing like the green one that sells insurance on TV.

I’ve been watching the waves of immigrant lizards as they washed across my state ever since I was a kid. The Carolina anoles shared the hedges and porches with their Cuban and Puerto Rican cousins when I was growing up in Tampa. Now I rarely see them, they’ve been crowded out of the southernmost part of their range. The blue tailed skink used to be common, but I haven’t seen one in years. They lived in the leaf litter and under rocks and logs, but I think something chemical has killed them off, some fertilizer or insecticide.. The curlytails are from the Caribbean, I don’t like them. They are big and fat and seem to bully the others. They carry their tails coiled up in little spirals above their backs as they run on the sidewalks. They only showed up a few years ago and now seem to be everywhere. But even though they can climb, they prefer to stay on the ground. They climb up automobile tires and hide inside, dropping off when the car stops somewhere. Consequently, they have spread like wildfire. I suspect they eat other species’ eggs when they find them in the soil; that explains a lot, since they don’t really compete for display space like the others do.

And then there are the pets, the basilisks and Jesus lizards (they can run across ponds and canals on modified feet when threatened) The Jamaican anoles resemble their Carolina cousins, but they are two to three times their size, over a foot long. The pets escape their masters, or are deliberately released, but now they are everywhere. And then there are the iguanas, the big males close to 4 feet long. Once or twice a year when it gets cold enough to stun them they fall out of trees, terrorizing the tourists.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched this drama play out, Florida is the perfect habitat for these guys, but in the past the sea acted as a barrier to them. And I’ve lived long enough, and have been curious to their ways, so I can sense the waves of strangers and how they compete (in many different ways). But the migrants came in, first on banana boats, some supposedly deliberately released to attack some agricultural pest, maybe even on floating shrubbery, but most by the pet trade.

And then there’s the glass snake. Its a native, and not a snake at all, but a legless lizard (the eyelids are a dead giveaway). They lived underground, tunnelling in every garden. Hard to miss, they could be up to 2 feet long, and their tails would break off to distract predators while they scurried off to safety. I haven’t seen any of them in years. It shared its habitat with the ringneck snake (a real snake, this time) but they have become very rare, although I did find a group of hatchlings in my house a few years ago.