Not all animals are active during the day, there are some that prefer to come out at night and I don’t blame them.
Whilst I was with the Wild Volunteers I got to be involved with going on some of the scorpion walks at night with a few of the guests that were staying at the lodge. I was an extra pair of eyes to help find the scorpions along the trails.
Scorpions are one species of animal that are really cool to find in the dark because you have to use a UV light to find them otherwise they would go un-noticed. The UV light makes them glow a neon green/yellow colour so are easy to spot. At the lodge there are two different types of scorpion that can be found, the Opisthacanthus asper and the Uroplectes formosus. The difference between them in normal light compared to UV it quite amazing.
As well as finding scorpions at the end of the walk we would head down to the waterhole to see what frogs we can find. There is a huge variety of frog species in South Africa and some of the species that we found were the guttural toad, painted reed frog, bubbling kassina, foam nest frog, knocking sand frog and the sharp-nosed grass frog. It’s very entertaining when your trying to catch these frogs to get a close look at them as they like to give you the run around, when you do catch them though you are then able to get a close look at their beauty
