Animal Visitors

It's that time of year, when especially in Japan we get more animal visitors in and outside our house. Guido, the gecko, has been a regular on our kitchen window since the warm weather returned. We think it's the same fat gecko from last year, he has a sweet bug-catching spot there on the lighted window. We also see little green frogs outside the house, crickets and today a little praying mantis. Yesterday while I was cooking dinner, Callan came running into the kitchen from the sunroom saying "Mommy! Come See! A snake! A snake!" I was a little apprehensive, hoping it wasn't large and IN the sunroom, but I was excited to find it wrapped around the last "bucket" on our drain pipe (I guess it's not really a drain pipe, but it does the same thing.) He stared at us for a while and we watched him sway a little in the wind. We tried to figure out where he came from and how he would have gotten there. Then he decided to climb back up the inside of little hanging baskets. We came back about half an hour later and he was gone, so I guess he figure it out. In case you were wondering (especially you grandma types), I'm pretty confident this was not a poisonous snake. At first I wrote that there is only one type of poisonous snake in Japan, but I was wrong!