Oh my goodness. I started out to get the mail, and the dog was barking madly at the front door. I didn’t think much of it, because she doesn’t like the mail truck at all. Then I looked at the deck on the other side of the glass. One of these was sitting up sunning itself. I was quite fond of Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi story, but I don’t need the protagonist wandering around my yard!
Cooool. Run and find out!
Beats finding a cobra on your doorstep, anyway.
Eeewww! I didn’t know those things were running around your parts. Are you sure you’re not in India?
No snakes here (so far; the state and the Feds spend a few million bucks a year trying to keep the brown tree snake from migrating from Guam, where it’s decimated the native bird population).
Mongeese are an introduced species here; it was a failed attempt to curb the rat population. Turned out most rats are nocturnal (not all, though) and mongeese are diurnal. I grabbed for the camera, but the dog scared it into running up into the bougainvillea somewhere. I’d love to have gotten a picture of it. It was about a foot to 18 inches long (counting the tail), and he wasn’t snarling like the one in the photo. They’re very carnivorous, though.
We always had them running around our back yard. I like them.