We spent our first year in Panamá living in a house in San Miguelito, a growing suburb on the northeast side of Panamá City on the edge of the rainforest. Arriving during the Pandemic, we did not have a string of international visitors like we’ve had since moving into our Costa del Este apartment in Year Two. But that did not mean we were without guests. They just tended to be very small and had more than two legs. Outside our front door for a few months we had an orb weaver spider, whom Brian named Trixie. When her hundreds of progeny were born, Audrey said it was time to get rid of the web outside our front door, and Brian utilized the two most important words for a happy marriage: “Yes, Dear.”

With a snippet of rainforest outside the backyard fence, we also occasionally had mammalian critters loping along, but none made it inside our house.  Inside, though, early in our stay we did think we had a rat problem because of the droppings we found in various places of the house, primarily in the utility room that was semi-open to the elements.  But after investigation we discovered that gecko poop looks remarkably similar to rat droppings, except that at one end there is a white tip of urates (or “solid pee”…because that is how geckos take care of business).  Since geckos are actually very good friends to have around to eat otherwise bothersome insects, we were happy to give them free rent in our house and just cleaned up the results of their insect-eating habit when we encountered them.  On the other hand, we were much less thrilled by the scorpions that came into our house.  In the year that we lived there, we found (and promptly dispatched with scorpion spray) five scorpions in different rooms of the house.  Yes, Brian has kept them in a little tray as souvenirs that he shows to our human visitors when they come to Pananmá.

But whether as welcome guests or not, we figured that upon our move to a 45th floor apartment in an urban neighborhood instead of a house on the edge of the rainforest we no longer would have tiny, non-bipedal visitors in our home standing more than 500 feet above ground.

The first correction to that misimpression was the discovery of birds hanging out on our balcony now and then.  (Okay, technically birds are bipedal; but they primarily use wings for locomotion, especially to get up to our balcony.)  We have seen a hawk perched on the balcony rail, and we have found vulture feathers as evidence that the ubiquitous birds some call the Panamanian Air Force (noting that Panamá does not have military branches) sometimes chill on the balcony at night.  And Audrey has seen one of those gloomy-looking creatures staring at her from our balcony through the living room glass as she wondered if her number was up.  The second correction was finding an occasional gecko peeking out from inside the pot of a plant or trying to be invisible while climbing the side of a kitchen cabinet in a quest for winged insect treats in the plants Brian has growing around our home.

The strangest correction to our mispresumption, though, happened in May.  Brian came home from more than six weeks in the Pacific Northwest where he helped his mother as she recuperated from some unexpected surgery.  (We are happy to report that she is recovered and fine now, and we hope will visit Panamá soon!)  On his first night back here, he said to Audrey that he thought he heard crickets.  Rolling her eyes, she said, “Yeah, I’ve been hearing them for a little while now.  I can’t find them anywhere, but every night they are chirping and chirping.  It’s really annoying!”  Puzzled, Brian said, “But we can’t have crickets up on the 45th floor.  They must be a chorus of geckos chirping.”  Yes, geckos chirp.  But a gecko chirp is a pronounced staccato instead of the long rapid-fire chirping sound of cricket stridulation (i.e., when crickets rub the legs and/or wings together to make the chirping sound).  It really sounded like crickets.  But how could that be?

After Brian hunted outside on the balcony and inside the apartment, following the cricket sound as best he could, it turned out that they really were crickets in the our 45th floor.  Brian finally found them.  First they were on our balcony.  We’re not sure how high crickets can fly, but we allow for the possibility that strong winds carried them up this high and dropped them on our balcony.  For a few days after Brian returned from the PNW, he regularly found a cricket or two on the balcony trying desperately to get inside.  They failed, and they suffered their fate on our balcony in the Panamá heat.  And we thought that would take care of it.  But we kept hearing chirping every night for another week or so.  Finally, after the chirping had stopped, Brian also found crickets in the deposito (closet) behind our bar off our dining room.  How they got up here remains a mystery to us.  How they got through an outside door and two inside doors into the deposito without traipsing through our entire abode is a mystery of mysteries.  But we’re glad that’s where they ended up and trapped themselves there.  When Brian found them, they were the cricket equivalent of Monty Python’s “Parrot Sketch.”  Suffice it to say, they were ex-crickets.  

The best we can figure is that Panamá had a bit of a plague a few months ago.  When we talked to our friends about how mystified we were with the presence of crickets in our 45th floor apartment, they uniformly told us that they also had crickets in their homes.  Friends several floors up further east than us in Santa Maria had crickets.  Friends 21 floors up downtown in Coco del Mar had crickets.  Nobody knew where they came from.  This was a new phenomenon.  But crickets we had all across town.  Brian even saw crickets crawling out from under shelves at our local Novey store (Panama’s version of Home Depot) while shopping there in May.

It didn’t last.  The ex-crickets in our deposito had expired by the time Brian found them shortly after he returned from the PNW in early May.  The balcony crickets lasted about a week after Brian came home and then were no more.  But for a brief time we had our cricket plague.  What’s next on the list of plagues?  We can’t begin to imagine, nor do we want to.  Meanwhile, as our friends John and Barb Savage declared of our circumstances when they visited a year ago, we continue to “live a vacation every day” in our otherwise paradise.

On your mark, get set, here we go!