The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Killing Tarantulas with a Machete

Things go bump in the night. Iguanas are scrabbling on the roof and geckos scream intermittently all night long. The howlers don’t wait for daylight to announce dawn and a lot of birds and insects apparently never sleep. I guess they don’t expect us to sleep either. There’s no shutting the windows — we use screens to cool down at night so the nocturnal cacophony is ours to share.

Last night a rhinoceros beetle the size of a VW hit our bamboo shade in the dark wings beating the slats like a drummer OD’ing. Trust me, you come out of your dreamy slumbers ready for combat. Only to turn on the light to find a 3 inch bug catatonic on the shade. I found him next morning where I tossed him, dead, I thought, but no, just resting up.

I would hate to wander the trails here in the dark. Odds are good you’d run into something poisonous, toxic, dangerous or malevolent. Trust me, nettles seem rather benign from my vantage here, compared to a fer-de-lance or a scorpion or a crocodile or a tarantula. Let’s don’t even mention ocelots, jaguars, snapping turtles or coral snakes, poison toads, boa constrictors, boar peccaries or the well named vampire bat. Back home I don’t fear much of anything unless it’s on two legs — down here I feel like food, no doubt why we clear jungle, drain swamp, clearcut the wilderness. The denizens give us the creeps.

I think we’ll emerge fairly unscathed, maybe even make a truce with our unseen predators. I’m told the ‘Ticos’, the Costa Rican natives, kill any snake on sight. When I asked why, I was told they were deathly afraid of them. A gringo here at Costa Rica Larry’s was helping clear trail by machete when a tarantula fell down his shirt front. In his terror he took the machete to the armpit the spider had crawled into, carving himself up like a Turkey dinner. Fear is primal. Nature, to most of us, is terrifying. I suggest we all put down the machetes before we hurt ourselves needlessly. Course, I don’t want my armpit to be the home of a tarantula family either. The chiggers there already are bad enough.

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