Critters

Scorpions

I never had any experience with scorpions before I went to Haiti.  Our first experience was in bed, when my wife got stung by one. That proved to be the first of several such bedtime experiences with them.  I did have some close encounters, however.

I’ve always navigated fairly well in the dark—stemming from the days when I had a morning paper route.  While my wife used a flashlight for nighttime trips to the bathroom, I just went in the dark (though I would usually carry a flashlight).  On one such trip I was just putting weight down on one foot when I felt something under the arch.  So I quickly shifted weight to my other foot.  Now I used my flashlight.  In its light I saw a scorpion with a dust bunny stuck to its stinger.  Benefits of imperfect housekeeping.

For several years during our stay in Haiti we were participating in some mesquite trials with Texas A&M University at Kingsville.  We had 2 hectare (5 acre) plot with electrified barbed wire around it to keep the goats and sheep out.  Our fence posts were made of rough logs.  As they aged the bark would begin to peel.

I would make regular trips around the fence to inspect it and pull off peeling bark that would short out the fence.  I would regularly find scorpions living between the bark and the wood.  Several hours after one such trip, I was back in the house when I felt something on my thigh under my pants.  From past experience with wasps I knew not just to slap at whatever was there but to slap and grab.  That way, if I neglected to kill what was there, I might prevent damage from a stinger.  So that is what I did.  Upon the grabbing I felt something wiry in my fingers.  So I carefully removed my pants while hanging onto the object.  What I discovered was a scorpion, and I was holding it by the tail.

All that time the scorpion has been in my pants it must have felt that my leg was the log and my pants the bark.  It was probably wondering why it couldn't get any good bugs to eat.

Spiders

We are generally content to let spiders live, even in our house, because they help keep population of undesirable insects down (though they’re not really fussy about whether their food is undesirable to us or not).  But some spiders enjoy a less than wonderful reputation.  Among those are the brown recluse (violin spider) and the tarantula.

We had often heard of the brown recluse spider though we had never seen one.  One day my wife had what appeared to be a blood blister on her leg.  It reminded me of pictures I had seen of brown recluse bites in the early stages.  If it was in fact a brown recluse bite, I knew that it would develop a target like appearance by the next day.

Sure enough, by the next day I saw the target appearance to the wound.  So I asked her where she might have been two days earlier where she might have had to move something or go to an area that is not often disturbed—since brown recluses are, well, reclusive.  After thinking she remembered having to move the examining table in the clinic to treat a wound.  So I went to the clinic, moved the examining table and there she was.  What was interesting was that the spider was of a variety we had all over the place.  However, on the Haitian variety of the spider the violin pattern is the same color as the rest of the body and so is not obvious unless examined very closely—which I had not done until that day.  It was over six years before the mark where the spider bit her completely disappeared.

I still usually allowed brown recluse spiders to live when I found them since they usually caused me no harm. A few weeks later a friend called on our radio asking if we cold bring him a brown recluse so he could see what they look like.  He thought one had bitten his wife.  It was very easy for me to go to one of our outbuildings and find one within about 15 minutes.

I only had a couple interesting experiences with tarantulas.

On one occasion I was in my upstairs office when my wife called me to come quickly downstairs.  She was watching a fight between a tarantula hawk (a large black wasp with bright red wings) and a tarantula.  By the time I got downstairs, the fight was over and the tarantula hawk was victorious.

The wasp was in the process of dragging the spider into its hole, which was right near the walkway on the South side of our house.  We watched as the tarantula disappeared down the hole where the wasp would lay its eggs in the body.

On another occasion, I was in the process of planting some shrubs near our house, when I noticed something hanging from the brim of my hat.  I went to brush away the piece of thatch that I figured had fallen off the roof of the gazebo above me, when I noticed that the piece of “straw” was furry.  So I carefully removed my cap and set it on the ground so the tarantula could walk away.  It must have crawled up my back and I never even noticed.

Snakes and Lizards

There were a lot of lizards of various sizes in Haiti, but the most common were anoles and geckos.  These small reptiles would get inside our house where they served as our low cost, environmentally friendly form of insect control.

The geckos were very small, up to about 2 inches long.  They were orange with black tiger stripes.

We had no ceiling on our first floor, so the sub-floor from upstairs was visible.  There were lots of small openings between the boards of the sub-floor, where the geckos would hang out.  At night, when we turned on our battery powered florescent lights (the kind you find in RVs), the geckos would feed from the mosquitoes and other small insects that would hang out near the lights.

Anoles are small lizards that change in color from green to brown.  They would get up to 5 or 6 inches long.  We didn’t have too many of these in the house.  One of them earned a special place in our hearts.  This one had lost a foot (we think it might have resulted from a run-in with a visitors who was unaware of these other houseguests).  So we named this one Peggy for the peg leg, which she (he?) didn’t have but perhaps could have used.  Peggy lived in our living room.

Peggy (with missing right rear leg) on our little flamingo statue

There were two larger lizards that were less common.

We lived at the edge of a large lake called “L’Etang Saumatre” which means brackish lake—which well describes it.  There were many freshwater artesian springs that came up near the shore of the lake forming clear, cool lagoons.  Caymans (crocodiles) lived in the lake, but would slip into the lagoons at night looking for food.  (The activity of people in the lagoons kept them away during the day.)  One unfortunate night we lost our dog, Princess, to the crocodile.  The locals found the dog floating in the water early in the morning before the crocodile had even left the lagoon.  They eventually caught and killed the big lizard.

The Crocodile that killed our dog

The crocs were unwanted because they would wreak havoc with the gill nets the fishermen used.

One day we woke up to find a crocodile tied up in our yard.  The unfortunate lizard had gotten tangled up in a gill net that had been set out by one of the teachers who lived in the house next to ours.  The teacher was hoping to find a buyer for the beast.  All day long, the crocodile sat motionless in the yard while the teacher tried unsuccessfully to find a buyer.  Finally, at night, leviathan made his break, and the next morning only the empty noose remained.

When we moved out to house, folks from our mission administration told us about this island in the lake.  But we hardly believed them because we never could see one.  Finally, we took a long walk down the east side of the lake and, sure enough, there was the island.  IT was small, maybe 200 by 500 feet at the most.  It was not far from the shore and was hidden from our normal view by this spit of land that jutted into the lake.

Several years prior to our coming to Haiti, a PhD student had lived in the house we were now occupying.  He was a guest of the previous missionaries.  He had been studying the caymans and had left behind a 14-foot aluminum boat with a 15 HP outboard motor.  One summer we had a visitor.  This high school student knew something about boats and he helped us get the outboard motor running.

So we took the boat out onto the lake and cruised out to the island.  There we found the island overrun with iguanas.  We didn’t even know there were any iguanas left in Haiti.  They were fairly safe from hunters there, because the crocodiles liked to hang out in the calm waters of the narrow gap between the island and the mainland.

Snakes

There were not a lot of different kinds of snakes in Haiti.  The main ones were boa constrictors, garter snakes and green snakes.

Boa Constrictors.  I did not see a lot of boa constrictors, but I had some interesting experiences with them.  During our first year we were in Haiti, we lived in a small tent community.  We did have a small, tin roofed shed we used to store animal feed in.  However, we had a problem with rats.  I thought it would be good to have a boa constrictor live in the shed to keep the rats away.

One day, one of our co-workers said that they were cutting down a tree in from of his house and that he knew there was a boa in it.  He said it would be a good time to rescue it since otherwise it would just be killed.  So we went and got the snake and carried it back to our camp wrapped around a hoe handle.  The snake did not care for our shed, though, and escaped the first night, probably to a nearby tree.  For days the locals were afraid to come near our camp because they knew the snake had to be around somewhere.

One day, probably a month or two later, a couple fellows walked up to our camp carrying a burlap sack.  They said they had a snake they wanted to sell me.  So I opened the sack and pulled out the snake, holding it out in front of me with both hands.  It was amusing to see the two guys back off when I did that.

Green Snakes.  Green snakes were long and skinny.  They might get to be six feet long but still be only about 1 inch in diameter.  These snakes lived in trees.  When they wanted to get to the ground, they might just let themselves fall to the ground.  Because of this, most Haitians were afraid of them because they felt that they were being attacked.

We were sitting at home one night around the dinner table.  There was a work team visiting, so there were about 8 of us.  All of a sudden we heard this nasty scream like we never heard before.  So we brave men grabbed our flashlights and headed outside.  It was an interesting sight we saw.  Our windows had bars on the outside made of ½ re-bar.  In the bars was a snake with a frog in its mouth (these were a kind of tree frog that were quite common).  At this point the frog was sideways in the mouth of the snake so it still had a chance—maybe.  We left them alone but went out later to find something more interesting. The snake had managed to swallow the frog and then had tried to creep in between the siding boards on the upstairs of the house.  However, he was stuck because the frog-bulge made him too fat to get through.  We weren’t sure how well he would fare, since snake scales aren’t designed to go backwards, but the next morning the snake was gone.

Snake Strangling Frog

Frogs and Toads

Sometimes we felt like we were living in Egypt during Pharaoh’s time—with a plague of frogs in our house.

These frogs would get into our house and hide out in the toilet flush tank.  Every time we would flush we would get this chorus of croaking.  Just about every night we would throw them outside and just as often they would get back inside again.  If they jumped on you while taking a shower or sleeping—well it would be surprising.  It took us a long time to find and plug all the holes they used to get in the house.

Haiti also has huge toads.  The giant toad (Bufo marinus) had been imported to Haiti as a means of pest control.  Many Haitians thought they were pests.  One fellow told me the toads were eating his cucumber.  It was guilt by association.  He came to his garden one morning and found toads as well as holes in his tomatoes.  They must have done it, right?  If he had been there overnight, he might have caught the toad in the act of eating the worms that ate his tomato.

Edd holding a giant toad

Cafe a la frog

During our first year in Haiti, we lived in tents.  We had a common cooking and eating area made of woven coconut palm leaves arranged on living fence posts with a tin roof set over the whose thing.

We had no electricity and our light was from old fashioned oil lamps, which furnished us a dim light.

Lynn in the Kitchen

For a while I used to get up very early, while it was dark, to head off to the gardens to work.  I would make the coffee for the morning.  I would take the cloth filter down from where we hung it the previous day, fill it with coffee and pour hot water through it—not so automatic drip coffee.  One day, I came back to the camp after the days work and I got an earful.  When those doing cleanup that morning emptied out the coffee there was a dead frog at the bottom of the sock!!  (I guess he didn’t  like hot coffee being poured over him.)  Anyway, from that point on, I was sure to check the filter for frogs before making coffee.