More creatures

Lately, I've been pointing the camera at anything that moves. There's a lot of things that move around here, and not all of them stay outside...

Here's some more giant crickets. The first chap was on my Jeep tyre when I spotted him, then he jumped to the garage floor.




This green one was clinging to a drainpipe.


One of the local cats on the prowl :-)


Here's a big giant toad! I think this is the guy from the hole. He spent the entire night outside our front door. He wandered off in the morning, enticed out by the sprinklers coming on, I imagine.

There's at least two toads in the hole now (we're just waiting for some peas to go with that) - I've seen them in there. I reckon it's more of an underground chamber these days; who knows how far they've dug? I just hope they don't take out the entire underneath of our wall.

This is a Cicada (I think). Any rate, it sits in trees and makes the most enormous racket all day and all night. There's thousands of them out there. You know the tropical jungle crickety-type noises you hear on films? That's these guys. We have lots of trees, ergo we have lots of cicadas. They're hard to spot; I got lucky the other day and found this guy on a low enough branch that I (a) spotted him at all and (b) could photograph him.



And lastly, the one you've all been waiting for - Scorpions!
Here's one running across our kitchen floor. He didn't like the camera flash.


Here's another one on the stairs, with a cent beside it for scale. British pennies are about the same size as American ones. And this chap was about 2mm shorter in length than the kitchen one; most of the ones we have seen are around these sizes. We did see a little baby one, only a centimeter (1/2 inch) long. It was almost cute... but not quite cute enough... ;-)