Flyiing Termites and Other Critters

When you think of African animals, perhaps you think of large, exotic animals like lions and hyenas and giraffes. I haven’t seen any of those yet here in Chad, and actually in much of Africa, it would be pretty unusual to see them outside of a game park, where such animals are (more or less) protected from human interference. But we do have our share of smaller critters, especially since we’ve just experienced the first few downpours of the season, and rain tends to encourage them to come out and be active.

Early last week, my coworker Susan and I took a short trip to the town of Koumra, a little over an hour’s drive west of Balimba. The previous evening, we’d had our first major rain, and after the first rains, termites sprout wings, come out of their nests, and fly about. They are very attracted to lights, so that evening there was soon quite a number of them flying about any lights they could find in the house – first little ones, like small flies; then later on in the evening, bigger ones about the size of small wasps. Thankfully both kinds of termites are harmless, but they do tend to fall to the ground after they have flown about for a little while; so you can imagine the results if you try to eat soup under a bright light when the winged termites are out! So as we prepared for our dinner, we just turned off the nearest overhead light and went on with our evening meal as usual (actually, Chadians do eat the bigger termites, but they weren’t on our menu that evening).

After we returned to Balimba, there was another hard rain, and the following evening we were visited again by the local termite population – but this time, far more of them, and all big ones. They found all the holes in our fly screens and soon there were quite a lot of them flying about the overhead lights in the dining room and living room. For a while, I tried to ignore them and went on with what I was doing on the computer. But soon there were too many to ignore, so I decided to retreat to my bedroom to read in peace under my mosquito net.

A little later, Susan and I peeked into the dining room to find every corner of it totally covered with termites; so many that the noise of all their wings sounded like an electric fan running at full speed. We ended up having to turn all the lights in the house off, including flashlights and reading lights, and spent the rest of the evening in the dark. The next morning, the termites were nearly all gone, except for a few crippled ones crawling around. They had finished their nighttime activities, lost their wings, and crawled away, leaving behind their wings scattered all over the floor and furniture, like tiny leaves on a windy autumn day.

There are plenty of other creepy-crawly critters around. There is one creature known as the scorpion horse, or camel spider which comes out in the rainy season (I’ve already seen one or two). It’s neither a scorpion or a horse, and I seem to remember reading somewhere that it technically isn’t a spider either. And I don’t know how it got associated with the camel. But whatever it is, it’s a lot like a large, ugly spider that moves very quickly. There are also genuine spiders: plenty of daddy-long-legs as well as the bigger and scarier varieties of spider.

 But not all the small critters here are ugly. One little critter that has come out with the rainy season is even kind of cute: a creature known as the joli bug (not sure if that is official name but that’s the only name I know for it). It is about the size of a ladybug, and very bright red, in sharp contrast with its typically brown surroundings.

Even cuter is our cat’s latest litter of kittens, which are now about six weeks old and cute as buttons, They are now actively running about the house … and generally getting underfoot.  Hopefully, they will learn to earn their keep as well as their mother does, helping to keep down the population of less charming African critters that find their way in and around our' homes.