All Creatures Great and Small!

When most people think about Africa and animals, their mind usually goes in one of two directions. Either towards that of the creepy crawlies or towards all the amazing safari animals roaming free.

As we still don't have a vehicle that we would be able to leave town with ... our wildlife experience in the past 6 weeks has been of the smaller variety! Bugs in Swahili is 'wadudu' which covers pretty much all the very little ones and is a funny word to say. As you saw in our first blog from Tanzania we had lots of the 'bitey ant' variety by the front and back doors ... thankfully they've all gone now!

The first batch of tomatoes we bought ... had added extra protein contents, which appeared from inside one tomato when we left them in water to clean them!

The girls are LOVING the lizards and gecko's that are around. They know that they eat the ants and mosquito's and get really excited when they see them! We have several lizards that like running around the outside walls of our house, we often hear them scampering across the mosquito netting over the windows! There are at least two gecko's inside the house too, one which let Abigail touch it last week much to her delight!! (The little gecko below was about the size of a little finger!)

A couple of week's ago we went to a BBQ at another MAF families house and the kids found a chameleon. There are quite a few around at the moment and some are tiny! This one was quite happily sitting in Abigail's friends hair!

Outside our front door in the grass is a spider hole. We often stop by and have a look at the spider inside, sometimes she's there and sometime's she is tucked down inside. We say 'she' because Abigail has decided that because it looks like there is a smile on it's face it has to be a 'she'!!! She doesn't come out of her hole just pops up for food from time to time.

Yesterday was our latest discovery (see below) ... on the path just out side our neighbours house, only a few metres from our house. 

A pile of small eggs (you can see the size from the car key placed beside them) which are either lizard or perhaps even snake eggs! You can guess that right now we're hoping that it wasn't the latter! They were taken away and crushed individually just incase they did belong to a snake and we're hoping that the mummy doesn't come back to find them. They quite possibly belonged to one of our friendly lizards but as you can imagine we just weren't willing to take that risk!

No scorpion sightings as yet ... but we're sure it's only a matter of time!