Big Island, Hawaii 2018 – Part 4

In case you missed it, here are the previous links for our 2018 trip to the Big Island of Hawaii:

I love seeing the Gold Dust Day Geckos on the Big Island.  They’re everywhere!  But they’re very hard to find on Maui and Oahu, and nearly impossible on Kauai.  According to sciencing.com, “In 1974, a student at the University of Hawaii released eight gold dust day geckos, a native of Madagascar, into the Upper Mano Valley [of the Big Island]. The bright green lizard has beautiful blue-rimmed eyes, two or three red lines across its snout and, as the name implies, orange-gold spots across its neck and shoulders.”  Every time I see one I get instantly happy.  They’re so adorable and they love anything sweet so it’s easy to entice them closer for photos 🙂  I took almost all my gecko photos at Kope Lani Cafe in Kona:

        

        

The cafe has a “Gecko Diner” with little cups they fill with sweet syrup.  The geckos LOVE it and climb down the light pole and onto the railing where the cups are.  When we first arrived the cups were empty so hubby went into the cafe and came back with a little cup of syrup to fill them with.  It didn’t take long before we had 5 geckos narrowing in on our location:

        

       

I love watching them drink the syrup:

        

The were climbing down onto my purse:

        

And onto the table to eat the crumbs left behind by our bagels:

        

At Bongo Ben’s restaurant a few days later we were eating breakfast and enjoying the ocean-front view when we noticed a gecko approaching.  Jim put out a little container of guava jelly and the next 10 minutes were pure magic:

        

        

        

Before moving the jelly container close to where we were sitting, Jim originally had placed it at the edge of our table to entice the geckos closer.  A bird even joined in [photo credit JIM]:

Overall we had a great time and can’t wait to go back!!!:

        

And we can’t wait to retire there in 9 years, 8 months, and 3 weeks 😀