An Update Since Being “Home”

For anyone wondering, our days of living out of a truck and birding across the continent of Africa have come to an end. Anyone who follows us on eBird must already have suspected as much. I must apologize for the delay in updates, but since travelling home in the middle of September, a lot has happened — namely my sister got married. (!!!)

As the maid of honor, it was a whirlwind few weeks of wedding festivities, with the bridal shower, bachelorette party, and wedding on almost consecutive weekends back in my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a lot of driving back and forth and instead of updating the blog and posting about our travels I got caught up in the moments with family. While travelling around Africa out of a truck I made it a top priority to not fall too far behind with my updates, but since being home perhaps that priority shifted down slightly. Having since returned to “normal” life though, I thought I would update everyone about what we have going on.
First of all, Ross has gone back to working full-time at the same company he worked for prior to leaving, but work does not deter him from going out birding as much as possible. Fall migration in the Eastern US, namely Cape May, NJ, is one of Ross’ most favorite birding spectacles and he wouldn’t dare miss “morning flight” on any morning with decent northwest winds. (Cape May is less than a two-hour drive from where we currently live in Eastern Pennsylvania.) Unfortunately wind and weather conditions prevented any spectacular morning migrations, but we did still venture down to Cape May for a few mornings and caught up with our world-class birding friends who are resident there. We also got to see an absolutely amazing Monarch Butterfly migration on one of the days! Unfortunately the month of October, normally a month where a few vagrants can be found, did not produce even a single one in our home state of Pennsylvania, but we’ve been out birding nonetheless. Truth be told, it has been nice to bird frequently and still shower regularly, eat well-balanced meals, and see family and friends.

As for Africa, we finished our 6-month trip with a visit to the country of Gabon on Africa’s west coast, exploring areas that almost no one goes to and I can’t wait to share the updates from that trip! Our beloved Toyota Hilux has officially been sold and hopefully the next person loves it as much as we did (although the new owner purchased it as a truck and all of our overlanding gear has been sold separately. HUGE thanks to our friend Rich Lindie of Lindie’s Birding Jaunts for all of his help in this selling process!) Perhaps our truck will enjoy living out its days as a regular bakkie (the South African name for a pickup truck) on the nice roads in Southern Africa as opposed to the kind of obstacles we took it through.
Stay tuned for blog posts on our remaining time birding in Namibia, South Africa, and Gabon because I promise I have it all written!

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Many people tell me I don’t share enough of the “gross” details about our trips. If you want to hear a quick story about something really gross keep reading. If that’s not your thing, catch you next time!

A few days after getting home Ross noticed that his finger was starting to hurt and a small blister was starting to form around his nail bed. We’d been so busy running around that he sort of just ignored the pain. He also failed to mention this pain to me at all for fear that I would yell at him for biting his nails and getting his finger infected. But finally he decided he was going to pop this blister and release the pressure he was feeling. (Do not come here for any medical advice!) Ross also decided to do this on one of the weekends I was back in Pittsburgh celebrating with my sister. Soon after he starts, I get a message and a photo along with the text “Do these look like eggs to you?” Low and behold a closer look revealed that there were small, white, oval-shaped eggs INSIDE of his finger. I just responded with a “yes…” I know many people would not want to be around for this kind of thing, but as a nurse I was kind of disappointed to be on the other side of the state the night that my husband finds eggs inside of his finger. It was gross but he carefully extracted every single egg and cleaned his hand really well. He kept the eggs and then proceeded to do a bit of online research to find out just what insect did this and what kind of medical attention (if any) was needed. A bit of online research indicated to us that a female sand flea was likely to blame. What typically happens is a female sand flea burrows into the skin and sucks the host’s blood before producing eggs. The flea typically lives for 4–6 weeks, after which the eggs are expelled and fall to the ground. The eggs would typically fall into the sand and the whole life cycle can begin again. Usually the toes and lateral rim of the foot and heel are common sites with 99% of all lesions occurring on the feet, but Ross had found the eggs in his hand. In the end though, it made sense because one of the last birds we saw during our African adventure was African River Martins beginning to set up a colony in the sandy banks inside of Luongo National Park alongside hundreds of Rosy Bee-eaters. Since Ross was crawling around in the sand to get better photos, he must have had a sand flea crawl inside and lay the eggs! I guess the biggest side effect can be infection so for anyone wondering, yes, he did decide to get some medical advice.

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