At Long Last!

After years of attempts, poor timing and lack of adequate sunlight, I finally obtained a beautiful shot of a brown anole exposing its brilliant dewlap in a territorial display. It’s a male, of course; female seldom fight or display.

Digital cameras take wonderful pictures. The only problem is there is about a half-second delay between the time I trigger the exposure and the time it actually takes the picture. Most of my “dewlap display” pictures show just half of the dewlap.

This one is the result of at least a dozen and a half exposures. And as I said, I finally got lucky.

The anole lizards are sometimes called “American chameleons” because they have the ability to blend with their environment, but are more closely related to iguanas than chameleons.

We have two varieties in Hawaii – the green anole and the brown anole. We have both on our property. Interestingly, the green ones tend to hang out higher in the plants, and the brown ones would rather stick to the lower branches and the ground areas.

Anoles are thriving in lush Manoa Valley. The original ones were brought in as pets and apparently escaped and bred like the dickens. At any given time, I can go out and count at least three or four crawling around the plants of stone walls.

It’ll probably be another dozen years before I can get a shot as beautiful as this one.