The Creatures in Our Neighborhood

Looking out my window and seeing the Avila - beautifully forested low mountain that separates Caracas from the Caribbean Sea - I am constantly reminded that I do not live in Kansas anymore.  But my day-to-day life includes many of the things normal to life anywhere - getting the kids to school, running to the grocery store, and fixing dinner make Caracas feel like a very normal city.

But every once in a while, we go for a walk and see something which reminds us that we live in the jungle.  It may have been paved and constructed over in the past few years, but it is still jungle and home to many large and beautiful creatures.

 I passed this little green guy on the sidewalk in front of our building.  He is a bit bigger than my largest finger.  He's awfully cute, but I didn't touch him because aren't fuzzy caterpillars supposed to be poisonous?

We've found some more typically brown and small ones in our garage.  We don't touch them either, but we do generally stop and stare at them on the way to the car.

While the fuzzy green caterpillar is kind of cute, this guy is just plain creepy.  He's a vulture of some sort, and if I'm working quietly in the living room he will land on our window sills and wander around outside.
As we keep our windows open nearly all the time, and we don't have window screens, I am superglad that the embassy installed this netting.  When I first saw it, I thought the netting was to keep my kids from falling out the windows.  Now I think it is to keep these big ugly birds from wandering around inside.

This big fella was right in the middle of the girls' school, in an outdoor plaza which is always full of people.  I did not move him, but I worry for the poor kid who unwittingly stepped on him while chatting with their friends.  He was not just wide - he was tall, too.

 

This dude is well camouflaged by the stone wall about a foot behind him.  Look closely, though, and you'll find a spider who was nearly as big as my open hand.  But to allow you to see the size comparison, I would have had to put my hand very near to this guy.  And he was really big.  I did not want to do that.  I didn't even try to sell my kids on it - we just took the photo and ran.

But here is the piece de resistance.  This photo belongs to National Geographic Kids, because when we came across our own specimen I was too astonished to pull out my camera.

We were driving home from church and saw an iguana in the middle of the road.  We were driving on the right side of the road, and he was lying across most of the left side.  Apparently, a typical iguana is about 6 feet tall and this guy fit the bill.  Luckily, no one was approaching from the other direction.  Also luckily, the guy in the car in front of us took it upon himself to get the iguana out of the road.  Here's what happened, though.

When the guy - probably 6 feet tall himself - opened his door to approach the iguana, the lizard reared up on his hind legs and flapped open all of those flaps of skin you see around his neck.  He looked fierce!  The guy was unintimidated and continued to shoo him across the road.  The iguana first hid underneath his car, and then eventually jumped into the bushes.  But jumping is exactly what he did, almost the entire time.  He kept rising up onto his hind legs and lunging toward the guy, spreading his gills out wide each time.  After a while, he was lunging himself toward the brush on the side of the road and once he reached the edge he disappeared into it entirely.