Visitors of the animal kind!

The road to the Christian Vision farm passes by a small game farm. Often, especially when we have been traveling back from town in the late afternoon, we see antelope near to the boundary fence.

Recently we saw a whole herd of impala, running parallel to the fence. This was a spectacular sight. The impala are very nervous of noisy vehicles, electric windows being lowered and excited passengers (!) so capturing a photo of them is often difficult.

However, I managed to get these shots the other day - a magnificent male impala, also known as a rooibok (red buck)...

...and this female impala in a Zambian bush setting.

We had some wild creatures entering our home recently: some welcome, others not!

Pulling back the bed covers recently, our friend Steve discovered he would not be sleeping alone that night:

These stripey skink lizards are very common.

Then, we had a visit from a tortoise. It didn't enter our home voluntarily, but was brought in by our guard. I would have liked to have kept it as a pet, but Andy felt it best to return it to the wild:This is Misty, an abandoned kitten that a friend staying at the farmhouse found a few weeks ago:
But these 'visitors' were not welcome at all...

...a tiny frog in the shower. I removed it to outside and wasn't too concerned until I later found several, again in the shower. Then we saw them in the hall and even found some in the bedroom.

For the next few days we played 'hunt the frog' around the house, trying all sorts of ways to prevent them coming up the drain outlet pipe into the shower. Andy opened the drain cover and discovered hundreds of baby frogs in there, some making their way along the near horizontal drain pipe into the base of the shower.

We asked the site maintainence team to come and sort the problem out - which they did most effectively, but the result was that later that day, dozens of baby frogs were jumping around outside. Most were well camouflaged, but here are some on the green wall outside the back door:

We then discovered some in the kitchen, but we think our resident skink lizard, who usually resides beneath the freezer, enjoyed them for supper - we couldn't find any in the kitchen the next day!

So perhaps we won't be so hard on our lizard friends in future...