Creepy Crawlies

Post by Lara

8 August 2013

This story happened a while ago, but we decided to delay publishing it until after Kevin’s family came and visited us. You may understand why after reading on.

When we first moved to our site, we were enthralled with the lovely canopy of mango, orange, cacao, and avocado trees that offer shade for our house. We were also excited that the environment seemed to attract an endless variety of wildlife: butterflies, horn bills, wydahs (a long-tailed bird), and quite a lot of insects.  We’ve frequently spent afternoons hunting butterflies or beetles to photograph, and we don’t have to go far to find them.  It took us a while to realize that this lovely assortment of wildlife also included some not-so-welcome house guests.  Cockroaches are unavoidable in this country (and just about anywhere on this latitude). Salone is also home to a variety of spider that is apparently harmless, but grows quite big and is generally referred to as a common spider. Common spiders are considered good luck, so we often refer to them as good luck spiders. Here’s a good luck spider we befriended early-on, named Stuart. It may be hard to tell, but his leg span is about as big as Kevin’s palm:

The first time I saw a tarantula outside of a zoo or pet store was in my bathroom.  It was dark and I was heading out to the toilet (about 60 feet from the back door of our house) just before going to bed, and as I opened the door I noticed a dark spot on the wall. Turning so my headlamp lit the wall, I saw it.  Without saying a word, I turned around, went back inside, and said, “Kevin, get the camera. There’s a tarantula in the bathroom”

“A tarantula? Cool. Coming” he replied.

We went outside together and Kevin stopped outside the bathroom, saying, “Oh cool! That’s not a tarantula but it’s pretty big”. Confused, I turned to see a relatively big and ominous-looking spider sitting on the outside of the door. “That’s not it” I said, and brought Kevin inside. “Wow! It’s a tarantula!” he gasped. “Yes. A tarantula. Like I said.”  Kevin managed to get a photo with both the spider and the tarantula in it. The tarantula was almost as big as Kevin’s hand, fingers and all.

After we got our photo, I decided I didn’t need to use the bathroom that bad and we went to bed. The next morning our new friend was nowhere to be found.  We showed a picture to our neighbor and she immediately yelled at us, “Why didn’t you come get us? You have to kill those! They bite people!” She then told us that the volunteer who lived here before us found no less than ten of those inside the house during the two years that he lived here. Ohhh boy.

The next tarantula we saw was not kind enough to stay out of the house. As we climbed into bed one night, we looked up to the ceiling and saw him clinging to the wall in the corner.  Since it was already late and we weren’t inclined to wake the neighbors to come into our house and kill a giant spider, we decided to tuck our bed net in extra tight and deal with it in the morning.

Unfortunately, it’s not terribly easy to sleep when there’s a tarantula watching over you. At least not for us. I knew we were heading for a restless night, but I had no idea how restless it would turn out to be.  Around 3 am Kevin woke up to the sound of plastic scraping on the concrete floor of our parlour. He got up to investigate and found the lid to a bucket of ours hopping across the floor. Confused, tired, and mildly terrified, he picked up our wash bucket, set it on top of the jumping lid, and got back in bed, tucking the net in securely.  Kevin told me what he saw and we both presumed the tarantula had gotten itself stuck.  That’s nice, we thought—our friends won’t have trouble killing him now.  We promptly lay back down to attempt to sleep. Almost immediately the moving-bucket-lid-sound was replaced by the sound of whatever we had trapped scraping the inside of the lid it was trapped under. 

About two hours of scraping later, I was the one who ventured out of the bed. Kevin called into the parlour, “it hasn’t moved, has it?” I replied, “I don’t know. Where was it when you put the bucket on top?”

“About 4 feet from the bookshelf” was the reply.  Oh dear, I thought.  The bucket was only about 8 inches from the shelf now.  I quickly found the first heavy thing I could locate—our charcoal iron—and plopped in down into the bucket. “Ok, now it’s not going anywhere.” I said before sneaking back under our trusty bed net.  The last two hours that we attempted to sleep, we were serenaded by the incessant scraping of the trapped creature against plastic.  Needless to say, we didn’t do a lot of sleeping.

In the morning we decided to leave the bucket until after school, when we would have a friend come up to investigate. We knew it was going to be a long day, having gotten probably 2 hours of sleep through the night, and we were anxious to get it over with.  As I tied my shoes while sitting on the edge of the bed, something on the wall caught my eye. Looking up, I saw the same tarantula, still on the wall, about 10 feet from where he was the night before. Then what the heck is under the bucket? My mind wandered to all sorts of nightmarish places, egged on by the paranoia that a sleepless night can inspire.

After school, we brought our friend Homeboy (his real name is Idrissa) up to the house. The tarantula was thankfully right where we left him, and the bucket had not moved.  Homeboy got a stick (more like a small tree- about 10 feet long and 3-4 inches in diameter) and moved into the bedroom, being sure to remove his shoes before stepping into the room, as is culturally appropriate. We tried to tell him that wasn’t necessary, but he insisted.  With two swipes and one big stab, the tarantula was no more.  Next we pointed him in the direction of the bucket, which by now was a giant mystery to us—what did we catch? Another tarantula? A snake? A rat?  Homeboy wasted no time. He slid the lid out onto our veranda and slowly lifted it. Out came…

A mouse. Not even a big mouse.  Still, mice are pests here and can spread all sorts of diseases including the dangerous Lassa fever, so Homeboy was not going to let it go. He killed it quickly, and disposed of it outside the house. 

After this second encounter with tarantulas and one incident involving a small, harmless, yet unwelcome-in-our-bedroom snake, we set to work sealing the small cracks around our windows to at least make it a bit more difficult for any more crawlies to get inside. Our house is still home to several good luck spiders, though the slow ones get picked off by our kitty Nimbus pretty quickly.  Speaking of the cat, since we got her we have seen significantly fewer pests in the house, and tend to meet them outside in the bush, where we don’t mind seeing them.