Luckily it is raining well in Harare. More than we expected so our pool -turned into a water reservoir for a few years now- spilled over and the area became a true wetland! Water was also running from the top of the garden in large rivulets that avoided our dikes and continued unstoppably to the bottom of the garden washing our scarce topsoil. The consequence was that we needed to perform some emergency repairs to our contention dikes.

While digging from the sand the pile that we keep for this kind of work we found a cluster of twelve small eggs! Their shells were flexible so they clearly belonged to a reptile, probably a chameleon.

Stephen (our caretaker) and I were very excited to find them and went to communicate the good news to my wife as we were sure she would also be happy as I was quite sure them to be chameleon eggs. The news was received only with lukewarm enthusiasm and I was both disappointed and surprised!

It was after a few minutes of thinking that the penny finally dropped so I declared: “I am sure that they are not snake eggs”, trying to convince myself that there were not! “Why not?” was her immediate and rather expected reply. I could not argue so I decided to find out what they were!

I performed a rather thorough check in the Internet and could almost confirm that they were in fact what I thought. However, to keep the peace I agreed to leave them where they were found so that they will continue with their normal development.

Further reading educated me that it takes up to 300 days for chameleon eggs to hatch and the breeders of these animals in captivity start checking for hatching from day 220! So, if you had any hope of learning what came out of the eggs, you will need to wait until next year, if we are lucky to see the newly born emerging from the sand!