Our “Pet” Iguana

Iggy on his favorite jocote tree!

We’ve been watching our “pet” iguana outside on a regular basis.  He lives in the cement chimney of our sauna in our backyard.  Sauna you say, yes, we have a sauna in our backyard made by Finish people that lived here previously.  The stones for the sauna were even imported from Finland!  Why do we need to have a sauna when we sweat enough as it is?  Who knows!  That is besides the point, the topic for the moment is our pet iguana or as locals call the male iguanas, garrobos.  I have named him “Iggy” for iguana and Nate is calling him “Gary” for garrobo (obviously we haven’t come to a consensus yet on his name)! 

Every morning, he usually pops his head out of the chimney and props himself up for a good, long look around.  How he comfortably does this is still unknown to me!  He hangs out on the roof, being super stealthy and still, checking it all out.  Occasionally, he’ll move his head to have another view.  It’s fun to see him around our yard and it feels like we have a pet since we see him almost daily.  We’ve even seen him crawl up the orange tree beside our house to get into the area between the ceiling and the roof.  The first time we heard him, we thought it was pigeons on our roof.  We confirmed it was an iguana on my birthday (Dec. 10^th) when I awoke at 6 am to noises above us.  I looked up and saw something staring at us through the gaping hole we had in our ceiling panel.  When I went to grab my glasses to get a better look, he scurried off on top of the ceiling panels. 

Hopefully our landlord won’t kill him and eat him!  He killed one recently in our yard and told us about it afterwards.  From my understanding, iguanas are protected species (illegal to kill, catch or trade) because they are rapidly declining in numbers, from over-harvesting and habitat loss.  In terms of regulating and enforcing laws that do exist, that is another story.  I did a little research and I’ve narrowed down Iggy to either the Cetenosaura quinquecarinata (Club Tail Iguana) or the Cetenosaura similes (Black Spiney Tailed Iguana).  Iguanas are generally omnivores (eating fruits, flowers, foliage and small animals and insects).  This surprised me because I always imagined iguanas to be herbivores, but our neighbors who have a lot of chickens, have mentioned that iguanas like to eat their baby chicks.  They too have been keeping an eye on the iguanas in our yard. 

Iguanas and their eggs are a delicacy and worth a lot of money in the black trade market.  Our little buddy, Iggy, is about 2 ½ feet long (including tail) and would go for 200-300 cordobas (about 10-15 dollars).  On the highway from Teustepe to Managua, there is one area where we regularly see someone standing on the side of the road holding one or two dead iguanas in their hand, trying to make a sale to the cars passing by.  This activity is illegal, but not regulated by police.  We’ll try to keep our yard a safe haven for iguanas passing through.  They love eating the fruit from our massive jocote tree, plus there is a great comedor (little restaurant) next door in our neighbors’ yard, with plenty of chicks to choose from! 

He was still enough for me to walk around him and take a few photos!