A problem never dreamed of in a city apartment

Calinouschka, my cat has been busy chasing lizards and digging to China in my garden on the balcony. I never imagined what would happen next when I opened the balcony door to let her in one day. She raced into the living room carrying a wiggly green lizard in her teeth and immediately dropped it on the floor. The lizard hit the floor running and disappeared under a sofa with the cat chasing it.

Now I had a problem I never would have dreamed of in a city apartment: a small tender green spunky lizard loose in my house. Obviously there was no way the lizard would return outdoors on it's own with a cat dancing around it so I put the cat out in the hall and closed all the doors. When I lifted the sofa, the lizard ran and hid under the other sofa. When I lifted the other sofa, it ran under the coffee table.

Now something else was obvious: I wasn't going to be able to catch it with my bare hands because it raced around faster than I coould chase it down. So when I finally located it clinging to the wall behind a sofa, I didn't approach it. Instead I got a small tranparent tupperware box with it's lid from the kitchen.

Slowly and carefully I approached the box and trapped the lizard against the wall. right away it started wiggling around for lack of air and fell into the box. Then I carefully slid the lid between the wall and the box, so the lizard couldn't escape and then with the lid clasped on the box I moved out to the balcony where I set the open box in the planter. The lizard didn't move right away.

A minute later the lizard was gone.

Since then Calinouscka watches and digs holes in the balcony planters in the hopes of catching the lizard again.