Living in a menagerie

Living in Uganda and being slightly 'in the village' (ie on the edge of Kampala), we live amongst various members of the animal kingdom. Ambient sounds generally include dogs barking, goats bleating, cows mooing, cockerels crowing, frogs croaking, cicadas chirring and a variety of weird and wonderful bird sounds.


Our favourite animal neighbours, however, are a troop of about 15 monkeys, presumably from old grandads to cheeky young scamps who often greet us on our way to work or accost Ruth as she goes jogging in the morning.

Slightly more worrying are the snakes which you have to look out for. So far (to our knowledge at least!) we have had around 6 snakes in our garden and one that got into the house! Fortunately they are usually dead by the time we see them as our dogs are pretty mean snake-killers, as is Robert our night guard. He tends to hang them up for us to inspect for some reason.

To be honest we had become rather relaxed about this whole snake issue as most are no more than a foot long (although the one in the photo is about 3 ft long) and we figured they probably couldn't do much harm. However, when we asked Robert how dangerous they were, he said that back in his village he saw one like that that killed a cow!

Other familiar reptiles are the geckos (see right)that reside in our house. They are harmless and they eat mosquitoes, so that's a good thing, but they can give you a fright when they run across the wall when you are not expecting it. Matthew also had a shock one night whilst lying in bed - a gecko on the ceiling decided to pee on him. Very amusing (for Ruth).

For those of you who are worried, we have never seen a lion, apart from in a national park, and leopards generally only come out at night.......