Something I like about Niger is the common class of insects. I haven´t seen a mouse, rat, snake or worm to speak of (none of which I am particularly fond for their slithery-ness)...but what I have seen are primarily hoppy critters.
Here the grasshoppers migrate in droves! When they arrive, it´s more like a plague than anything else. The evenings when they are in town, you will be sorry for even daring to THINK of the word „lumiere“ (light) because they will maraud you in a blind frenzy. We pay steeply for even turning on a light and most often revert to sitting around in the tranquil dark, watching the blizzard of „crickets“ (as they call them here) flurrying above the light outside our gate.
Sitting inside a screened room with a light, it sounds like pattering rain, the interrupted flight pattern of grasshoppers meeting my screen. When I walk anywhere that they have settled, I feel like a celebrity with crowds of millions making way for my coming, scattering in every direction. Then in few days, the evenings are once again bug free since the gang of hoppers has moved on to another destination. „Crickets“ are food here, so you´ll find kids catching bags of them at the electric lights. But most people wait to cook the big ones that come in December. Those guys are the size of Jimmeny Cricket- a good 4 inches in length. Bon Appetit!
In general bugs are big here- so big that you cant really be caught off guard because you can see them coming. Beetles are half dollar sized, for example.
The other hoppy critters here are toads. They are everywhere at night. I think they´re cute, inspite of their squashy, intrusive selves. They just hop right on into anywhere thats open, like under my bedroom door...and then they´re stuck with me for the night- thummph! Thmmph! Thumph! Against the closed door that they just came under and now would like to hop back through. A scary sound for my first night here, but cute when I realized who it was.
I´d take hoppy over slithery if I have the choice.
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