Wildlife and Bugs?!

I had a request for a blog post about what kind of wildlife and bugs we see on a regular basis.  Well, we don’t live in East Africa, we don’t have amazing African Safaris here, no lions, zebras, giraffes, or elephants…that I know of.  We have been to Hippo Lake in Mango, Togo where we’ve spotted bumps of hippos popping out of the water, but that’s the most exciting wildlife we’ve seen in Togo. 

In reality, there are many similar animals and insects here as in the United States, such as beetles, roaches, termites, millipedes, ants, flies, dragonflies, birds, bats, cats, dogs, pigs, cows, goats, donkeys, chickens.  Here they are much more visible though.  The creepy crawlies are inside and outside the home- as much as you try to keep them out.  The animals, except for donkeys (which are always seen tied up and pulling things) are found roaming all around town, scrounging the ground for any food-garbage they can find all day long, and then they go home at night. 

Some of the bugs look a little different here, like this millipede:

This is one of our “friends”.  We have a few geckos that live with us to cut down on the insect population.

This next picture was taken on our wall outside.  I’m not sure what these bugs are called, but I call them “red” bugs or “ackee” bugs.  Circled below are the stages of growth.  We had a bit of an infestation of these red bugs inside and outside of our house, thanks to our lovely ackee trees (February post), NOT.  These bugs were all over the ackee fruit/nut when in season and even made it inside where they started laying their eggs all over our walls and furniture.  Little orange dots here and there and everywhere.  The little orange dots changed to red dots after a few days and the next day those dots started moving.  Thankfully we saw them and were able to get rid of most of them and cleaned up all the fallen ackee and their nuts.  There are still a bunch around the trees, but most of these annoying, but pretty much harmless bugs, are out of our house now, except for a handful that fly in every night.

We don’t have any chickens or goats of our own yet, but we do let these 3 animals live inside our wall.  Sometimes we even bathe them!

This is not our tree, but we do have bats in our mango tree.  We hear them squeaking every night.  I really hope they don’t bite into ALL of our mangos.  I’d really like to eat at least ONE of our own mangos this year.  Soon they will be ripe enough to see.

Some of these cows are on the national highway.  We are on a dirt road a long the national highway.  You can see a dead tree on the far left of the picture that is set up as a barricade for the highway.

I’m sure you see the goat on top of the luggage of van in front of us, but also notice the overloaded semi in front of him which has a handful of men sitting on top of the bags of charcoal or rice or corn or all of the above.  This is a very normal picture.