I sometimes feel like a crazed squirrel when I’m stacking firewood. instead of collecting acorns though, I’m stacking veritable mountains-chains of cleaved wood chords. We have three firewood storage tanks with any surplus wood arranged like Hadrian’s Wall along the driveway to keep out the Celtic hordes (oh, they’re coming, don’t you worry about that!).
Sometimes, loading wood onto the glowing coals of a winters’ hearth, I reflect on the hours of stored sunshine I’m releasing. That’s pretty much all wood is, energy made in the fiery heart of a star, delivered to us across the cold vastness of space, captured by plants and stored away as carbon-based goodness. Recycled sunshine energy, literally.
But anyway, this story is not about firewood per se, but rather an ancient creature that dwells within my woodpiles.
As my children well know, when lifting firewood from the stack it’s extremely inadvisable to place one’s fingers where one cannot see them. The firewood tanks are home for a veritable metropolis of furtive or fanged lifeforms. From shiny, black gonzo-like weevils who play dead (complete with legs held comically aloft), to terrifying, hairy wood louse and brawny huntsman spiders the size of a child’s hand (a coincidence? I think not).
And then there’s Stephen of course, whom avid readers of Nature Notes will readily know is a rather tetchy and deadly serpent I ofttimes have nocturnal dealings with. So, all-in-all, retrieving firewood in the dead of night can be rather like Tinder I guess, a bit of a random gamble. Or so I’m told.
But there’s another reason for exercising extreme care whilst lifting firewood.
Here is a typical instance:
Last night while extracting a hefty chunk of firewood from the pile my attention was suddenly drawn to an almost imperceptible movement on the underside of the wood. Slowly rotating and lowering the wood back onto the pile a section of bark that wasn’t bark began to arch up at me and hiss raspingly. It was a young southern leaf-tailed gecko.
Let me describe what I saw – it had dark gemstones for eyes, a lichen-covered leaf for a tail, Velcro-padded feet and the voice of a cute, but pissed off baby demon. If it were a lolly, it would cost 50 cents apiece and taste like candied ginger.
We adore geckos above all other creatures in the woodpile and take great pains to avoid inadvertently crushing their impossibly delicate, squishy little bodies between chunks of firewood whenever we can. Besides being kick-arse cockroach hunters, geckos bring joy into the hearts of all who behold them. I for one, would rather be ruled by a ruthless gecko overlord than by the National Party.