My gecko encounter on Maui

This might just be my favorite of the hundred or so videos I took on Maui in December. This gecko was so majestic, and so huge, that he might not even have been a gecko. He might have been an anole, a similar-looking creature which grows to twice the size. I'm trying to figure out if this one had sticky pads on its toes. What do you think? It might be an anole, after all, but he looked like velvet, and regarded me with what seemed like intelligent eyes. OK, I know that's fanciful, but he was just adorable, and stayed for a long time (again, most un-gecko-like: most of them are seen only for a split-second as they dart back into a crack in the wall). The creature had a tail so long it wouldn't even fit in the frame, and was always partially hidden behind something. I'm still trying to figure out the size of it - at least a foot long nose-to-tail, perhaps longer. Geckos run four, six inches or so. As a kid I loved loved LOVED reptiles and amphibians, had a chameleon (actually, an anole), a fire newt, and a whole collection of frogs, toads and turtles, not to mention a snake or two. I longed for a salamander, but never found one. This gecko would have sent me into rhapsodies of joy. I just had to wait for it, I guess, though waiting more than 50 years for something can be tiring.

If I had an alligator

If I had an alligator, which I'm not likely to do in the near future, I'd want it to look like this.

When you  see something white which is normally some other colour, you automatically think "albino". But no! My research tells me these are leucistic alligators, which means they have blue eyes (and the rest of them is ivory, not pure white). Big difference.

Leucistics are rare - I keep finding different stats on this, but one source said there are "only 12 of them in the world". I don't get this. Have they mucked and gumbooted through all the swamps of Louisiana in search of these "swamp ghosts"? Who knows how many are lurking under rotten logs, waiting to attack? The logic is that something like this would stand out like neon and wouldn't survive a predator's attack. But wouldn't an alligator be pretty handy at self-defense? What natural enemies does it have? It has survived for hundreds of millions of years without having to evolve at all. So does it matter if a handful of them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy?

Maybe it would. A white alligator hide might make tasty material for a Fendi bag. One of those purses that costs as much as the down payment on a car.

These guys are frightening, ugly and beautiful at the same time. While looking for appropriate images to make an animation (above), I found some beauties. Or uglies. 

The blue eyes seem to peer at us with some kind of expression, but they don't. This creature's brain has just one setting: FOOD. (Well, two, but the other one isn't turned on all the time.) It looks at you as if you were food, which you are. If you have a pulse, if you have warm blood - or cold blood - you're food. Do we have some primeval memory of being eaten alive by some prehistoric version of this thing? Imagine how big they were back then, given that everything was on a ridiculous scale.

This one creeps me out majorly. It's either jumping up in the air in a ballet-leap, or underwater. How would anyone get such a shot without being eaten?

Don't ever think it's smiling. It's not smiling. It is jaws on legs. It is hissing and death-roll, and then, digestion.

These three look almost poetical, except they're not. Once more I doubt the "only 12 in the world" statistic. Who runs around in the forest trying to find these? There must be more of them. Here's an extra one just lying around, basking on someone's dock.

My brothers had an old stuffed alligator (crocodile?) with cotton batting in it (the cotton batting spewing out of its stomach and having to be shoved back in). It was a real alligator, or it had been, the skin tanned like leather. I never knew where it came from. The boys played Tarzan with it, and claimed that if you turned the alligator (or crocodile) over on its back and rubbed its tummy, it would relax and become extremely docile. This is a legend along the lines of taming a bird by putting salt on its tail.

So the swamp ghost, the White Bite, the leucistic Fendi bag of Louisiana isn't a myth. Its only real enemy is humankind, which means it will probably be wiped out in short order, along with everything else.

That is the meanest face I have ever seen.

POST-SCRIPT. I never knew what I was getting into when I looked up alligator bags. I assumed they might top out at, say, $10,000.00.

But no. I found this in a post about The Five Most Expensive Purses In The World:

The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag – $261,000

Next on our list is the The Chanel “Diamond Forever” Classic Handbag for a little more than a quarter of a million. It’s limited edition and it’s incrusted with 334 diamonds, white gold hardware and white alligator skin. And that’s only №4!

The description does not specify if this is from an authentic leucistic alligator, or just some old garden variety Wally Gator from a golf course in Florida who had a dye job. One would think the scarcity of the variety would preclude making it into bags, even for a quarter of a million dollars. Might it be that hideous vinyl stuff we had in the '60s, which would get so hot and melty in the sun?