"There was an old lady who lived in a shoe . . . "

As the nursery rhyme goes, "There was an old lady who lived in a shoe . . . " Looks like Fritzina the lizard has become a regular in Judie's yard shoes. Judie has two pair of shoes that a positioned near the back patio door. They sit off the ground on a rack about four inches in the air. The shoes are black, one set is water proof, the other ones are leather.

In the morning, the morning sun reaches those shoes and being black, they must warm up pretty fast. So it becomes a perfect hiding place of the lizards. It provides protection from their enemies and provides early morning heat which they need. And the shoes are close to the ground but not too high and in their turf. Perhaps they are shoe lizards now.

We have discovered that they sneak in around sunset and get way up into the shoe. They locate well up into the toe area and you can not see them unless you use a flashlight to closely examine the interior of the shoes.

This prevents Judie from early morning forays into the yard. But since she is not an early riser like me, it does not make much of a difference. But sometimes late at night she does foray into the yard and now must check first or she will be startled by the critters in her shoes. I am not sure she is plesed by this but she seems tolerant of it all.

For sure there will be no scropions or crickets in her shoes. Fritz will take care of that for her.

Interestingly, we have two lizards that have chosen her shoes. We believe one is the off spring of the other one. Fritzina is pretty big for her ilk and the othe one is quite a bit smaller. This is Frizina's second year with us.

No matter, we like to see the little critters have chosen to live with us. They seem to be more tolerant of us. We do not startle them, or at least they are not prone to run away if we get too close.

We have seen a little Friz's roaming around out front. And we have seen the medium size Fritz go to the front yard via the driveway/garage area. In fact, I have seen them foraging inside the garage. Naturally, I do not have any crickets, or at least I do not have them for long as visitors in my garage.

I am thinking we must not have any snakes either. That is probably the lizards greatest enemy. That and hawks but we do not seen to have many hawks visit us. The Mississippi Kites that return from South America don't seem to get down and dirty with us either. So I expect we will have our Fritzes for a long time to come.

And that is a good thing.