Insects, Spiders, Animals, OH MY!

Here are just some of the wildlife we’ve seen in Israel during our first week…

-salticidae (also known as a jumping spider)

-a flying ant (it landed on my computer screen)

-a grey bat (unfortunately, it was dead–spotted on the Weizmann campus during my lunchtime walk. sad.) I think it was a fruit bat. It was about the size of my hand. And we’ve seen evidence of fruit bats in the form of brown spots all over our porch.

-a porcupine, we think. (my friend Leah has seen TWO on campus, so we’re fairly confident, though it was dark when we spotted ours, and didn’t want to approach)

-many large birds (I have yet to see any small chickadee-sized birds here yet. They’re all pretty substantial in size. We’re talking larger than a big crow/raven. They’re white and grey. I’ll have to find out what they’re called.)

-the largest cockroach I’ve ever seen (dead also, luckily. this thing was huge. see photo and note pencil, for scale of course. please also note how far the pencil is from the roach, meaning I was afraid to move my hand any closer, even though it was clearly dead. you never know…).

And about a thousand cats. Cats are everywhere, literally, in Israel. It’s hard to walk down the street without seeing one at least every 10 or 20 seconds. It’s pretty amazing! Cats here are like squirrels in Michigan. I saw one walk into a bank during lunch today ( I guess this is the problem with automatic doors that slide open and stay open for a few seconds). Awesome.

Well, that’s all I can think of right now.

More later on our trip to Tel-Aviv for the Fulbright orientation…

ToMolly