After being in the laboratory for a while, people from the area learnt that we liked animals and we started getting surprises as we were surrounded by interesting creatures.

The first arrival was a very young gosling that took us a while to identify although we knew that it could only belong to basically three species: Egyptian (Alopochen aegyptiaca), Spur-wing (Plectropterus gambensis) or the rarer Blue-winged geese (Cyanochen cyanoptera). After a detailed search we decided that we were the “owners” of an Egyptian goose and this was confirmed later on when it matured.

To get a stressed animal is always a problem but luckily it adjusted to living in a heated carbon box where it grew until it became too large for it and we built an enclosure with reed mats and, eventually let it go around the house with the consequences that this produced that needed to be cleaned!

From the start the plan was not to get it attached to us so that we could release it.

After a few months it started to beat its wings and run the length of the space between the houses trying to take off. Soon it managed to hop, and the latter became longer and higher. I started to watch it as it was great fun until one day, I saw it lifting off and disappear towards the hills! It was a great success as we never saw it again.

The absence of the goose was hardly noted as it was almost immediately replaced by a young kingfisher that did not look too good on arrival and could not yet fly. However, we placed it in the cats’ cage and supplied with water while we searched for suitable food.

It was easy to identify it as an African pygmy kingfisher (Ispidina picta), one of the very small kingfishers distributed widely in Africa south of the Sahara although it is not present in the whole of the horn of Africa. A woodland species, it is not bound to water and it is usually very secretive and mostly seen when it loses its nerve and flies off from its perch.

We learnt that the diet of this kingfisher consists of spiders and various insects as well as geckos and lizards. We were pleased to know that, among the insects, grasshoppers were acceptable as well as praying mantis, worms, crickets, dragonflies, cockroaches and moths. We knew that there were hundreds of grasshoppers across the road in the fields and we soon collected a few. Later we got a couple of children to collect them for us and we never had any shortage of food.

At first the bird ignored our offerings of water and grasshoppers but, to our relief, it started catching a few and to smash them against the box before eating them. We soon learnt that it defecated at one corner of the box while it produced food pellets with insect chitin as owls do with hairs and bones in a separate corner.

It ate well and clearly matured under the attentive gaze of our cats that were rather frustrated as they could not get it! Interestingly, the bird totally ignored the cats.

Eventually, I opened the box and allowed to be free inside the room during the day and placed it back in the box for the night. After a few days it was clear that it could fly well and we took it to a forested area and released it.

One day, we started hearing howls that we first identified as coming from young dogs but soon we realized that they were more like the sounds we have heard earlier in Kenya whenever we came close to jackals!

A search in our backyard (a large open field that continued all the way to Ethiopia itself!) produced a family of jackals that we identified as side-striped jackals (Canis adustus) not without surprise. They were a pair of adults and two pups that had taken residence in one of the unused shacks that remained from the time of the building of the laboratory.

They were not bothered by our presence and continued to stay there, well-hidden during the day but becoming active in the late afternoon. Luckily, they went unnoticed by the chicken owners in the laboratory but not by other inhabitants…

It is beyond my knowledge of animal ethology why our two cats decided that they would befriend the jackals. When we discovered a meeting, in panic, we went to the rescue as we thought that our pets were about to be killed. We managed to call them away from the jackals and took them home unharmed.

We kept the cats locked for a few days but eventually they went out of the house and, lo and behold, they did a beeline to the jackals again. This time, we decided towait and watch, and we were quite surprised to see them engaged in a kind of hide and seek exercise with the wild jackals, both adults and pups! After that we relaxed and watched the unexpected interaction until the jackal family left not to be seen again.

Apart from the long-term visitors, we also had a number of day guests. Among these the least desirable were the grivet monkeys as they would do lots of damage to Mabel’s garden as opposed to the black and white colobus that were not only beautiful to watch but harmless to our garden. I will describe a few more interactions with birds later but there was one that was quite scary.

It happened while Paul and I were working on the document for the extension of the project. We were sitting at home next to the computer when, suddenly, a large bird entered the room through the open window and landed on our worktable, as confused as we were shocked!

Amazingly it was a black kite (Milvus migrans) a rather large bird to be in close quarters with considering that it has 150cm wingspan and we could see that it had a strong beak and talons! Luckily, it departed almost as soon as it arrived leaving us rather amazed and looking at each other in disbelief!

The last long-term guest to arrive was a Common duiker (Sylvicapra grimmia) but I will deal with this visitor on a separate post.