Little visitor

It’s almost September already- crazy how time passes with everything that’s going on in the world. We have not had wifi at home for almost 2 months now - there was some kind of problem with our service provider and it can apparently only be fixed by someone currently outside the country, and, as we are on border lockdown, no one can get into the country. Hence, my blog has been a bit sparse, to say the least. I have been using my neighbor’s wifi (he has a different provider) in the meantime, and have picked up my teaching (I am currently teaching ESL online) quite a bit. So, all things considered, life is pretty good. And, something noteworthy happened about two months ago, so I will share here.

I was in bed when I heard a loud bang followed by the immediate commotion of all five dogs running towards something. I cautiously crept to the door, in the dark so no one (in case of intruders) could see me illuminated in the house, and saw all the dogs gathered around something on the ground. It was a small bird, and it was flopping its way unceremoniously across the sand in front of the house. It had run into one of our windows, hit the ground, and now couldn’t fly to escape the dogs. I ran to it, shooed the dogs away, scooped it up, and brought it inside. On closer inspection, Jay identified it as a Mozambique Nightjar, a very beautiful bird. Luckily, it was able to recover its strength and fly back out into the night soon after its rescue.

Interestingly, we had a juvenile African Goshawk fly into the house about the same time last year. It landed on the couch and stayed with us for a few days to recover its strength before it, too, was released back into the wild.