Sandflies, mosquitoes, sea lice, ants and other charming New Zealand creatures great and small (or what you can’t see on our pictures)

If you’re wondering why we don’t post more pictures of ourselves enjoying the wonderful fauna and flora in our garden, then here’s the reason: if we (that is everyone in our little family apart from Scott) stay in there for longer than 5 minutes, we all get eaten alive by mosquitoes, sandflies and ants. Poor Jacob is reacting quite badly to the bites of any of those animals.

Everyone who has visited New Zealand before, must remember having been attacked by swarms of sandflies, innocent looking ‘fruitflies’, that sting you in such a ferocious, hideous way that you scratch your bites till they bleed and that for at least a week, leaving you with dozens of scars, mainly around your ankles. There is probably not one visitor of this country who’s resistant to these little criminals. So, any who’s reading this and is planning to come and visit us is warned! Stay away from humid and hot places, unless you protect yourself with special insect repellent. Nevertheless the local sandflies and mosquitoes seem to like me so much, that they always find those couple of square millimeters that are not protected properly and bite me there. Some sandflies bite even through my clothes. They must be so desperate to get to my yummy Belgian blood.

Another lovely local creature that I only met recently, here at the beach in Tauranga, is the sea louse. You won’t feel them sting while you’re swimming, but when you sit in the water and don’t move they will crawl over your body and sting. The first time I noticed them was when I saw tiny little streams of blood running down Jacob’s bum (he’s always swimming without nappy on and no, he hasn’t poed in the water yet!). Only when I got bitten myself and managed to catch one of those little bastards, I learnt about the existence of sea lice. They’re tiny and transparant so that you can barely see them, but they manage to sting you pretty well. For some reason only Jacob and I are being bitten by them...

So far this little lecture on NZ animal life. In the meanwhile I’ve also been trying to learn the names of the native trees, but that’s going to a very long process, because they all look the same to me. OK, it’s quite easy to see the difference between a cabbage tree and a pohutukawa, but there are just too many different kinds of beech and pine trees here! Fortunately all native trees are evergreen, what should make winter not as grey as at home. As soon as I manage to work the hyperlinks on my blog I will add them to the texts so that you can see what I’m actually talking about.