Local Fauna

It’s been a while since I’ve commented on the local fauna. In that time, I’ve encountered a wide variety of interesting animals here. Here goes:

Birds

So, aside from the eagles that like to carry chickens off and eat them, we’ve got plenty of sorts of interesting birds. We were briefly visited by a few parakeet-like birds, we’ve got some with incredibly long tails (longer than their bodies), we have birds nesting in the rafters in our classrooms (the glass in many of the windows is broken, and the doors are usually left open, so they come and go as they please), and birds will occasionally fly into the staff room and then not understand the whole bit where there’s glass in the windows, so they keep trying to fly out and just sort of hover in the window frame, like insects do.

Oh, and we’ve got birds whose nests are shaped like spheres hanging off the bottom of tree branches, with a hole in the bottom of the sphere where the birds go in and out. So, basically, birds who build their nests upside-down.

Last but not least, we have a resident flock of pigeons that like to hang out on the sheet-metal roofs of the school buildings, and make quite a racket as they walk around.

Ants

I have seen a few different types of nomadics ants. One type is really tiny and digs trenches along the surface of the ground to travel in. Supposedly they’re vicious-enough that they sometimes (indirectly) kill elephants – they can get on the elephant’s foot/leg and bite it so painfully that the elephant tries to bash its leg against a tree or somesuch to disloge or crush them, and sometimes elephants break their legs doing this.

Another type of nomadic ant is really huge, makes hissing noises if you listen carefully, and has large hard-shelled brown egg things that they carry around. The other night I saw these bigs ones emerging from a tunnel they’d dug and then making their way overland; I have no idea how the tunnel-vs-not-tunnel decisionmaking works.

Word on the street is that we’ve got driver ants/safari ants here, and the Swahili word the locals use to refer to any sort of black ant is “siafu”, which as I understand it is technically the Swahili word for “driver ant”. For those who don’t know about driver ants: they’re pretty much incredibly badass and terrifying, I’d recommend reading up on them.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if one of these nomadic ant varieties I’ve seen (specifically, the big ones) are driver ants. I’ve poked at the big ants a little, though, and didn’t get any sort of aggressive response, which I would expect from driver ants. I may just not have been aggressive-enough with my poking, though, partially because I don’t want to get into a serious tangle with them if they are driver ants.

And finally, we have trapjaw ants here. Also worth looking up. Basically, trapjaw ants’ mandibles stick out straight to the sides, and are quite long and pretty thin. They close their mandibles explosively, and when they do so you can hear the click of the mandibles smashing into each other when they come together – doesn’t hurt the ant, though. Apparently some or all varieties of trapjaw ant can smash their mandibles into the ground in order to launch themselves into the air as an escape technique, achieving altitudes and ranges of several inches.

Giant Grasshoppers

We have grasshopper-like creatures here that are, no exaggeration, about two and a half inches long. Their hind legs aren’t quite as proportionally big and strong as grasshoppers’ hind legs, and they try to escape not merely by jumping really far but instead by jumping to a short height, and at the peak of their jump whipping their wings out and flying in a gentle downward slope until they land. They seem to be bad at flying, though, like chickens. Also, dogs and cats enjoy eating them.

Plague Of Moths

At one point, when I was staying the night in Karatu, there was a plague of moths. Hundreds and hundreds of moths came in through the building’s windows and amassed themselves in the hallway while I and the other volunteers I was with were in another room. We came out and saw large sections of the walls just covered in them, and every room ended up with a bunch of moths in it.