Geckos, scorpions, and flying snakes!

I still can’t put pictures up, but I can give you a bit of an update. The past couple of days we’ve been working with a herpetologist on a project involving geckos! I spent most of Saturday turning over rocks looking for the little buggers. We caught a bunch of Speckled Geckos and saw a ton of scorpions. I even held one! We were told that with scorpions, big pincers and a small stinger were safe, but you better watch out for one with small pincers and a big stinger. We didn’t have any problems with them.

This morning I got up really early to go birding with the senior game guard at Shingwedzi. A couple of the professors really wanted to see a nightingale thrush and the guard said he knew where one hung out. We didn’t see the thrush, but we did see fish eagles, a really cool hornbill, a kite, and several other really neat birds. I wasn’t too keen on it to start with, but I may be slowly turning into a birder. We also saw a couple of buffalo and tons of impala. The impala are kind of like the white-tail deer of Africa.

After birding, a couple of us went back into the field to get some scorpions to help with our project. Of course I volunteered. While I was hunting scorpions, I walked under a low tree and was startled by a flying body and a loud thump. A snake dropped from the tree less than a meter from my head. After coming back to camp and consulting with the herpetologist, it was probably a species of sand snake, non-venomous. Tonight we’re going on a game drive, so hopefully I’ll have more exciting tales tomorrow!