My house has a porch with a rail fence exposed to the sun, and thick shrubbery surrounding it. It provides what lizards require in a habitat, a place to hide from predators and a place to display and play mating and territorial games. Shade and sunlight are both available for body temperature control. I call it the Lust Patio because the lizards (Cuban Anoles, the native species have all been crowded out) spend most of their time doing pushups, bobbing their heads, and flashing their dewlaps, all part of their mating behavior. There's a lot of threat and bluff going on, and an occasional fight when two males are evenly matched. The winner gets the girl, just like with mammals. The little dudes have prodigious sexual appetities.

I can watch them for hours, if you sit still and read or listen to radio they tend to ignore you and conduct their activities as if you weren't there. I've seen some really amazing behavior, for example, when one catches an ant, it will shake it's head back and forth, scraping the ant's stinger off on the tile before eating the rest of it. Another neat trick is when they defecate, they will leave a dainty little pile, move forward a few inches and drag their bottoms on the concrete (holding their tails up in the air) to wipe off the area around their cloaca.

If you move (they have terrific eyesight) in a non-threatening manner, they will watch you, and sometimes give a threat display, just to see if it will work. Once they are convinced you are no danger, they will let you approach quite close, up to several inches. But they will scurry off if you get too familiar with them. When predators (mostly birds) show up, they all vanish. And when it's warm and they are most active, they are a joy to watch; I saw one once jump six inches into the air and take a cruising housefly, twisting in midair to catch it behind his back. When they are prowling through the bushes they leap effortlessly from branch to branch, using their tails for balance. Averaging about 150mm (about half of that, tail) for a big male, they are graceful, handsome little creatures, well proportioned and spotted and mottled in various shades of brown, they seem to be available in several different color varieties, or subspecies, or at least the males are, the smaller females are a light tan with a yellow-black-yellow stripe down their spines. It's the same decoration a chipmunk wears (no chipmunks in Florida). I wonder if that stripe offers little scurrying brown things some kind of camouflage advantage. They all have some ability to change their shade or color, but it seems to be more related to mood than camouflage. The males get darker and stockier when in prime breeding condition, developing a crest on their head and a belligerent attitude. The grackles and blue jays love 'em. Part of the function of masculinity is to provide predators distractions so the females can breed in peace.

In the evening, when it gets dark and cool, the anoles head off into the shrubbery to sleep, and the night shift comes out. The nocturnal lizard here is the gecko, and they tend to hang out around porch lights because they attract insects and allow them to be easily spotted. They lurk in the shadows and dart into the light when a juicy bug alights. They rarely miss. I would guess they were extremely rare before the electric light was invented. I know a lot less about geckoes than I do anoles because the mosquitoes come out at night and you have to keep moving to avoid them. Geckoes have a bumply skin, covered in little wart-like bumps, and a disconcerting ability to walk on porch ceilings and overheads. I understand they chirp, but if I've heard them, I probably mistook them for an insect.

When I was a kid, the Cuban anoles had just been introduced (probably from ships or imported produce) and the local species, the Carolina Anole, a larger, but less agressive, bright green lizard, was competing for space with the imports. There is no shortage of food, but the limiting factor seems to be available display space, like my Lust Patio. Today, you are more likely to find Carolinas in the woods, which the Cubans avoid; they survive fine there, but the urban yard landscape seems ideal for the Cubans, and they have taken over. The Cubans and the geckoes, however, don't seem to compete at all, having divided the day and the night between them.

There's a lot going on in the Lust Patio.