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Mo’o in the Vanillery

I see a lot of these guys in the vanillery. It must be a great envi­ron­ment for them, a mil­lion places to hide and hunt, with con­ve­nient walk­ways so you nev­er have to touch the ground. Mo’o is the Hawaiian word for lizard or reptile…it gets a lot of use since geck­os are so com­mon here.

Back off, this is my vine!

Mostly the ones I see in the vanillery are the green anoles. They look like tiny drag­ons, and they have a lot of personality…certainly when com­pared to a gecko! Their typ­i­cal green col­or match­es the vanil­la foliage per­fect­ly. They can change col­or, so they’re often referred to as “chameleons” and though they do have eye­lids that are a bit like them, they aren’t chameleons.

I came across this one, stand­ing out quite obvi­ous­ly because he was a very dark brown col­or. He was look­ing at me defi­ant­ly, so I snapped a few shots. Later he showed me his impres­sive dewlap. I think he was try­ing to scare me.

This oth­er guy is a less com­mon sight in the vanillery, the gold dust day gecko blends in pret­ty good, despite some stun­ning col­or and over­all bejew­eled effect. (we jok­ing­ly call them “gay deck­os”) These ones have been slow­ly tak­ing over from the typ­i­cal lit­tle brown geck­os we’ve always had. I’m pret­ty sure these day geck­os are more aggres­sive and so have been edg­ing out the orig­i­nal population…seems like we see more and more of them every year. For some rea­son the vanillery is not a usu­al place to see them. These guys love fruit, so instead we see them in the bananas and where we bring in our fruit from the yard.

The usu­al­ly very shy gold dust day gecko

4 thoughts on “Mo’o in the Vanillery

  1. Where can we buy the beans while we are in Kauai?

    1. Hi Earl,

      We don’t offer the beans at any retail out­lets cur­rent­ly, but you can pos­si­bly buy from us here at the vanillery. Email me at [email protected] to arrange that.

      –Roland

  2. Hi Roland. Is there any way to see the Vanillery while on Kaua’i? Even if just to dri­ve by & see the growth? We know you’re in the midst of the 2019 Harvest & would love to buy some fresh from the farm.

    1. Hi Nickie,

      I’m very sor­ry if this comes too late…I did not see the com­ment come in! Yes, we do tours, please email [email protected] if you want to book. We like to do them Friday after­noons, but we can be flex­i­ble, espe­cial­ly since I failed to answer your ques­tion in a time­ly manner.

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