We’ve put a slide show together of the creatures we have had visit our yard and home. It starts with birds and gets progressively ickier (probably not a word but you get the point). 

 

Even after growing up camping, being a “tomboy” and living in the country for the past 9 years, it still startles me to find cockroaches, geckos and massive millipede things in our house here. I guess it’s because they catch us off guard. Em had a large cockroach tangled up in her mosquito net the first night here and I stepped on one in the bathroom in the middle of the night.  Now I turn the light on every time I get up to take a trip there.    We often find them in the kitchen cupboards, running between the spices or our dishes. 

 

The millipede type thing you will see in one of the slides was literally 5 inches long and the grasshopper was around 3 inches long. The geckos are different here from the little dark ones you see in Florida. They are almost clear which makes them more disturbing, the one in the slideshow was on our ceiling and Olivia found one running on her wall on her way to bed just last night. Matt will think it is all very neat and interesting when he comes at Christmas and I think Tim needs a break from his job as pest control officer.   Such is life for us in Uganda. 

 

The birds however, have been really neat to see. Uganda is the birding country of Africa.  It has more species of birds per square kilometre than any other African country, more than 1000 species. This number represents more than half of the bird species found in the whole of Africa. This is due to its large variety of habitats: arid semi-deserts, savannahs, lowlands, rainforest, wetlands, volcanoes and an alpine zone. Uganda has altitudes ranging from 650 to 5000 metres above sea level. The Kampala/Entebbe area has 550 species of birds, many of which have visited our yard to sit on our gate or roof. Click on the slideshow to see a few of the different creatures we have seen at our home.