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Tuesday 6 January 2009

Wild Life

Uninvited guests

Laikipia

With a concussive ‘thunk’, another bird flies against our new farm house on the African plains. This happens a dozen times daily. They must be following flight paths established long before a human home went up. I designed our place to be solid. Construction used up 555 tonnes of sand, 1,476 bags of cement, 688 kilos of nails, 1,235 cedar poles, 16,500 running feet of timber, 1,833 wheelbarrow loads of rock ballast and 47 wheelbarrows (since it was all built by hand). An atom bomb could not destroy it.
But Nature rudely ignores our claim over home. Tap! goes the bedroom window at dawn. Taptaptap! Pull back the curtains. It’s a male hornbill attacking its own reflection in the glass. ‘How charming,’ I say. Tappetytaptaptap! Many dawns later this becomes an ornithological version of Chinese water torture. The only solution: Tappetytappetytappety BANG!

After the rains come swarming bees. While outside you become aware of a distant hum. This rises to an intimidating roar coming right at you. You duck just as the blue sky darkens, you look up, and a black rope of insects coils away after their queen. Into a hole next to the chimney she goes and makes her home there alongside you. Bees are strange lodgers. I am roused from sleep at the dead of night by the sound of a million beating wings suddenly starting up. The only way to evict them is to smoke them out by burning dried elephant dung: two turds will suffice.

I never thought I would miss elephant raids on our garden. For a while they vanished from our area, chased away by poachers. Several bulls were shot and their tusks hacked out. Last night three huge beasts appeared back on the lawn. They mock-charged me until I fell back on to the tennis court. Armed only with a torch, I was up all night trying to prevent them from devouring the herbaceous border.

More articles from: Aidan Hartley | this section

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