When your stalker has feathers...

The parched colours of the dry season.
Photo by Kim Reijs.

When I venture into the field these days it's like I've somehow slipped into a Disney animated classic.

All I need is a ballooning skirt and a tripping walk to make the illusion complete.

Why am I suffering these weird fantasies?

Well, the moment I set foot in the bush, I'm surrounded by clouds of little blue birds, all atwitter with excitement. And then the little animals come creeping out of the undergrowth to gather at my feet.
Magic?  Charisma?  Sadly no.
You see it's the height of the dry season here. With the bush seared, dusty and leafless, everyone could use a drink.

In an effort to curry favour with my study subjects (essential if I'm to ever find the little brutes), I reward them with a small bowl of water whenever I join a group. And of course it doesn't take long for the other locals to catch on too.

The mongooses crowd around the bowl, some delicately lapping with pink tongues while others dip in their paws and lick the moisture from their toes. Meanwhile a menagerie congregates around us.
Four-footed or two, feathered, scaled or furred, no one can resist the lure of free drink.

Tamarind (HF047) enjoying a tipple.

The tree squirrels (Paraxerus cepapi) aren't backward in coming forward.

Rough-scaled plated lizards (Gerrhosaurus major) disdain rules of etiquette.

Rainbow skinks (Mabuya quinquetaeniata) tentatively seeking that elusive pot of gold water.



"... and then I told that great brute of a mongoose to just clear off..."



The blue waxbills (Uraeginthus angolensis; pictured above) are the most persistent (and impatient). They accompany me as I search for the mongooses, flitting through the bare twiggy undergrowth, peeping vociferously. We collect more and more followers as we go, with everyone complaining loudly about having to wait to wet their whistle. I find this entourage a bit irritating because it drowns out the subtle, tell-tale peeps of my mongooses.

But if the waxbills are annoying, there's one avian devotee that drives me insane. Dressed in humdrum colours, it flutters from branch to branch above my head, ruffling its wings, wriggling its white-edged tail and bobbing about like a creature possessed. It also feels compelled to squawk non-stop. One of my bird books likens its raucous call to the sound of a shaken box of matches, which is pretty accurate if you pump up the volume about 100-fold.

This irksome devotee will dog my steps for hours (OK, for the purposes of scientific accuracy, I'll admit that this is a slight exaggeration). It certainly doesn't retire once I find the mongooses (and they dislike it as much as I do). You see it's not after a mere sip of water. It wants wax.

Yep, you read right: the greater honeyguide is one of only a handful of critters who's able to dine on, and digest, wax (thanks to special microbes in its gut).

But before you start imagining some ghastly Hitchcockian scene, let me make it clear that it isn't after earwax.
This feathered stalker hungers for beeswax.

Its fervent taunting is designed to persuade me to follow it to a likely bee hive. Once there, it expects me to smoke out the bees and heroically retrieve the honeycomb so it can gorge itself on bee larvae and wax (it doesn't eat honey). I've never felt tempted to accept this offer (opening a jar of jam seems safer), but if I'm unwise enough to move or speak in the bird's presence, it gets super excited and zooms off, in a sweeping, undulating flight, toward the nearest hive.

Although greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator) are only about 20 cm (8 in) long, they vex the inhabitants of woodlands and savannahs throughout sub-Saharan Africa. When not guzzling wax or terrorising baby bees, they make do with flying insects.
Photo by Carol Foil.

Now as a zoologist who studies partnerships between species (see an example here), I know I should revere this bird. Collaboration between beasts of feather and fur is rare, and the greater honeyguide is the poster child for such complicity.
But God it's annoying!
And the creature's not easily deterred; honeyguides will invade villages and gardens in search of someone with a sweet tooth, and they even pursue cars and boats.

You see the honeyguide has had the dubious pleasure of sharing its habitat with humans for millions of years, and that's plenty of time to notice a mutual fondness for bee by-products. But what's really impressive about the alliance that's evolved, is how well human and bird communicate.

For example, when the Boran people of northern Kenya decide to do a spot of honey pilfering they inform the birds by whistling piercingly through clasped fists (this doubles their chances of bumping into a honeyguide, who then reduces the time they spend searching for a hive by two-thirds). Of course the bird has reason to come running flying: only 6% of the hives (of Apis mellifira) in its territory are accessible to beak and claw alone.

Upon arrival, the honeyguide gives its annoying come-hither call, zips off for a moment (presumably to identify landmarks along its proposed route) and then leads the honey gathers in a beeline for the closest hive. (A three-year study found that the birds monitored all the hives in their area, routinely stopping by for a minute or so to check they were active).
Intentionally or otherwise, the honeyguide also informs its followers how far they'll have to walk. The further away the hive, the longer the bird is gone on its initial reconnaissance mission, and the nearer the allies gets to the booty, the shorter the bird's perch-to-perch flights become. When the team finally rocks up at the hive, the bird gives a special 'here it is' call, perches close to the nest and then keeps mum.

If you haven't already seen footage of a greater honeyguide doing its thing, you can view one (and David Attenborough imperilled by bees) here (courtesy of the BBC's Trials of Life).

The weirdness of greater honeyguides is not limited to their dietary habits. These birds are territorial and each male has a special 'song post' where he sits from dawn 'til dusk throughout the breeding season vociferously boasting of his macho charms. Interested lady honeyguides simply drop by for a bit of fun every now and again.
But once knocked up, female honeyguides appear to go to pieces, abandoning the fruit of their passion at the earliest opportunity. They cunningly slip their egg into the nest of unsuspecting hole-nesting birds (such as barbets and woodpeckers). When their little darling hatches, it dispatches its nest mates with a wicked billhook designed for the purpose.
Serendipitously, you can see wonderful photos of this villainous behaviour here.

The adoptive parent (a meves starling) of a greater honeyguide chick bringing home the bacon frogs legs.
Photo by Johann du Preev.

But all is not well in the land of honey procurement.
When I first started working on the dwarf mongooses six years ago, I was constantly beset by these irritating birds; now it's a rarity. I hadn't really given this much thought: sure, the resident birds had learnt I was a no-show and had given up on me (sigh of relief). But after researching this post I began to realise how bad this is.

You see in many places greater honeyguides don't indulge in guiding at all. It's believed that this is the result of humans, at some time in the past, welshing on the deal. And increasingly local people are abandoning traditional food gathering techniques (hey, sugar's dirt cheap at the supermarket), leaving the birds high and dry.
Similarly, human activities such as honey gathering are banned in national parks and other protected areas, exacerbating the problem.

So this amazing alliance between bird and mammal - rightly lauded as the world's most impressive example of interspecies mutualism - is rapidly disappearing.

And I'm hastening its loss!



Honeyguides and Honey Gatherers: Interspecific Communication in a Symbiotic Relationship. H. A. Isack & H. U. Reyer. 1989. Science, 243: 1343-1346.

The Fallacy, Fact, and Fate of Guiding Behavior in the Greater Honeyguide. W. R. J. Dean, W. Roy Siegfried & I. A. W. MacDonald. 1990. Conservation Biology, 4: 99-101.

The mysterious case of the missing mammals

It’s grim struggling out of bed on cold winter mornings but there are compensations.

For me, it’s watching the sunbathers.
Voyeurism, I know, but who can resist all those exposed fluffy tummies.

In the big nyala tree behind my house the vervet monkeys bob about like sailors in the rigging, waiting in the topmost foliage for the sun’s first rays. And when the light catches their coats, they blaze silver. Nearer at hand, dozens of tiny fire finches, blue waxbills and cut-throat finches squabble in the buffalo-thorn outside my bedroom. Lined up in the warming sun, they ruffle their feathers and shuffle their feet and complain non-stop in a cacophony of twittering.

But my favourite sun-worshippers sit about on the koppies (granite outcrops) I pass on route to my study site. Silhouetted against the sky on the giant ears of rock, they look like an infestation of ticks (OK, I’ve been working on small mammals for too long). But up close, they transform into pyjama-filled plush toys.



Rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis) are less adept than most of us at keeping their body temperature just so which makes their early morning sun-bathing session mandatory.

Now I’ve been spying on this unsuspecting colony of rock hyraxes (or dassies) every day for almost six years, so you can imagine my consternation a month or so ago when they all disappeared.

Was I passing by too early? Too late?
I often see eagles hovering about the rocks - clearly with evil intent - but they couldn’t have scoffed everyone. I rushed home to scour the hyrax literature to find what might have happened.
Apparently diseases like mange can wipe out whole colonies (yet no one’s looked moth-eaten) and a colony can include several widely-spaced koppies in their territory, so maybe they'd just changed residences (but they've never left before).

It was at this time too, that I noticed a new set of tracks on the road at the base of the koppies. Amid the usual mosaic of paw prints (laid down by genets and jackals, civets and porcupines) were prints I’d never seen before: the rear paw’s imprint always overlapped that of the fore paw.

Of course I didn’t put two and two together at first.
But then Koppiekats disappeared.

Koppiekats is the mongoose group who hangs out at the base of the koppies (hence their name). For days I scoured their territory (about 40 ha/100 acres of bush), searching every tussock, termite mound and cranny until I was quite certain they simply weren’t in it. But where were they?? A skiing holiday? A winter break in the Riviera? Victims of alien abduction?

Now when a mongoose is snatched by a ground predator, its group will desert that part of its range, sometimes for up to six months. But what could induce Koppiekats to vacate their entire territory? Dwarf mongooses are fiercely territorial critters and trespassing brings swift retribution. As I trudged about disconsolately seeking non-existent mongooses I kept stumbling upon macabre hints: the beak and piebald feathers of a late hornbill, random duiker legs, the half-consumed torso of a puff adder and a veritable fountain of francolin plumes. Hmm... Should I be checking over my shoulder?

Constant vigilance! Twenty-four species of raptor try to dine on my dwarf mongooses (Helogale parvula) and, on an average morning, the group suffers a predator scare once every 11 minutes. Unsurprisingly their repertoire of alarm squeaks is sophisticated. Their cries warn whether the peril is lurking in the grass or circling above and the degree of danger (from, ‘I spot trouble, but everything’s cool’ to ‘OH SH#@*T!!’).

It was at this point that I realised I’d better figure out who was making those weird paw prints. Now, for those without a foot fetish, deciphering the subtle disparities between the mitts of carnivores is wearying. I’ve spent many an hour crawling about in the dirt, clutching a grubby field guide and squinting in puzzlement at fuzzy-edged smudges. But these tracks turned out to be easy; there aren’t many carnivores with such distinctive pacing.
They were made by a caracal.

The caracal (Caracal caracal) may look like the lynx’s long-lost twin – complete with stumpy tail, untrimmed ear tufts and ginormous hind legs – but they’re not closely related. Molecular studies reveal that the caracal’s nearest and dearest is the African golden cat.
Photo posted on Flickr by e3000.

Now things made sense. These big-pawed, russet cats occasionally padded through our study site in the Kalahari Desert and when the meerkats got wind of one, they’d retreat down their burrow and refuse to emerge for 36 hours.
Why? Well caracals are weapons-grade predators. About the size of a small border collie, they’re dangerously opportunistic, slaying anything that's plentiful, from teeny bugs to antelope twice their own weight.
And they do it by ambush; lurking in wait to fell their victim with a single pounce.
And what a pounce!
A pet caracal, startled while sleeping, shot into the air, and measurements taken by the owner revealed that its forepaws only hit the wall at a height of 3.9 m (12ft 10”).

Such acrobatic feats have not gone unnoticed, and for millennia dignitaries in India and Persia (now Iran) kept tame caracals for hunting. In fact, caracals have given us that ever-handy expression, ‘put a cat among the pigeons’. The ancients - combining two favourite pastimes (bloodletting and gambling) - came up with a sport in which two caracals were set upon a flock of feeding pigeons, and wagers were laid on which of the cats would bring down the most birds. Hunting caracals can leap 4-5 metres (13-16 ft) into the air, and a skilled cat was able to snag up to ten birds before the flock escaped.

Dreaming of yummy mongooses? Back in the good ol’ days, caracals terrorised furred beasts throughout the deserts and dry savannahs of Africa, the Middle East and the Near East (as far as India and Russia). They’re now close to extinction in the northern hemisphere, and here in South Africa they’re classified as ‘vermin’ or ‘problem animals’ (depending on the PC-ness of the province) due to their taste for mutton, and are rigorously poisoned, trapped and shot.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson.

 
After a few weeks, the caracal prints stopped appearing on the track below the koppies (caracals have big territories) and, much to my relief, both the hyraxes and mongooses have now returned home. Unfortunately, two members of Koppiekats (Saturn and Shade) are missing, presumed consumed, and everyone else is pocked with bite-marks suggesting that their sojourn with the neighbours was not harmonious.
While I’m pleased that caracals live here (and I’d dearly love to see one), I do hope they don’t pay another visit soon.

Saturn (KM068). R.I.P.

Smelly little messages

 

A gratuitous mongoose piccy.




PLOP!

Something slipped from my thermos flask and splashed into my mug of tea.

I didn't see it happen. I was sitting on a boulder, with one eye on my mongooses, pouring a quick cuppa while they searched for bugs.
But I heard the plop.

What the...?
Oh god!
Bobbing in my tea was a sticky, black mongoose poop nestled in a small plastic bag.

How did this happen?
Well, when I'm out in the field I carry two thermos flasks. One contains my morning brew and the other is filled with ice to keep faecal samples fresh and perky. Unfortunately, the two flasks look very much alike. And sometimes I'm just not paying attention as I stuff a sample into a flask...

As I carefully fished out the neatly labelled bag, I could see that the tea had seeped inside. Presumably, worse things had seeped out. I didn't know which aggrieved me more, the loss of my tea or the sample. You see, after five years working with dwarf mongooses I've come to share many of their perceptions of the world (scary, I know). And for a dwarf mongoose, every poop is sacred.

Unlike other family members, dwarf mongooses don't just broadcast their droppings far and wide. In fact, regardless of the leg-crossing involved, they'll only poop at the group's special scent-marking sites or at latrines located by each of their sleeping mounds. Now you may think the early morning rush to use the bathroom is hectic at your house, but it's nothing to the jostling that goes on when a mongoose group gets out of bed. Tumbling out of hole, they scramble and dash across to the latrine, a dozen little furry bodies jockeying for position all at one time. Even mongooses that don't need to go make a huge effort to squeeze something out. And once the group has headed off to forage, it's not unusual for someone to realise they haven't completed their toilette and, all in a panic, they'll go racing back. But why do they go to all this trouble?

Does scat mean scat? Latrines were once seen as Keep Out signs but, in many species, they're really community notice boards, all aflutter with phone-number fringed personal ads.
Image borrowed from here.

We know from experiments with banded mongooses and meerkats that mongooses can discriminate between the poop of different individuals. And not just their nearest and dearest; they can also tell the droppings of neighbours from those of strangers. And banded mongooses act very edgy indeed if they encounter a neighbour's poop steaming on the wrong border.

But how do they do it? Well like all carnivores (including Fido and Puss) mongooses are blessed with anal glands that secrete a fatty substance. This goo sits about cosily inside an anal pouch where it's feasted on by hungry bacteria. The bugs leave behind an array of volatile carboxylic acids (which stink), and which ones you end up with (and how much of each sort) depends on which types of bacteria are lurking in your anal pouch. Since every individual has its own unique bacterial assortment, everyone's acid profile is unique, and thus so is their pong. (I do have to wonder how antibiotics affects all this, for example in zoo animals.)



Comet leaving a message.


And of course excrement is also chockfull of all the hormones coursing through the depositor's veins. So for those with a sensitive nose, the gen is endless. Is he stressed? Is he feeling mean? Is she willing?

With so much personal information being bandied about, it's not surprising that individuals sometimes indulge in a bit of self promotion.
At meerkat latrines, the ladies post alluring come-hither messages for the guys next door while their male group-mates dash about madly, trying to mask these billets-doux with stinky macho threats. The end result is an absurdly male-biased latrine whose shitty composition bears no resemblance to the actual group make up.



The take away message proffered by a meerkat latrine.
Image borrowed from here.


In contrast to meerkats, banded mongooses are far more narcissistic. They consider poop an in-house affair. Everyone is too interested in getting the low down – or putting one over - their sexual rivals (who come from inside the group, not out) to spare much of a sniff for the leavings of the opposite sex.


But what are the dwarf mongooses up to? Why do they – unlike other mongooses – religiously pile up huge middens outside their sleeping dens? It's not as if dens (i.e. termite mounds) are in short supply; there are 200 to 300 in each group's territory (I know because I've plotted every one) and the group sleeps - and latrines - at only about 30.

It's in an attempt to figure out why my mongooses don't waste their waste that I daily risk the integrity of my morning cuppa. The smelly little samples I spoon up are destined for use in taste sniff tests. The idea is to present a smorgasbord of poo to selected individuals and see exactly what takes their fancy. Are they more intrigued by the droppings of outsiders or group members; rivals or lovers?


 

A mobile perfume counter. On the right are a male and female poop from the sniffer's own group; on the left they're from a strange group. Don't panic! The one in the middle isn't from a mongoose on steroids; it's an antelope turd, just to be sure they aren't simply attracted to anything that pongs.


My first attempt at this experiment was not a success.
In fact, it was one of those ghastly moments when you see your research career evaporating before your eyes.
No one sniffed anything.
They totally ignored every single dropping.

In desperation, I grabbed up a poop and stuffed it right under Pleiades' nose. She screwed her eyes shut and turned her head away with such overt revulsion I was shocked. I couldn't have evoked a more negative reaction if I'd done this to a human! I could almost see her thinking, 'Who would leave that here!'

That was when it hit me.

Dwarf mongooses never leave their droppings lying about in the field, yet here I was presenting samples to animals as they trotted about foraging. It was like tossing post-it notes under the feet of busy shoppers and wondering why no one read them.

I tried again at one of the group's scent-marking sites.
And low and behold, they scratched and sniffed!
O frabjous day!
Of course this makes the whole procedure much more tedious because the samples must be kept frozen until just before they're presented. So I spend my days trailing after the mongooses, trying to anticipate when they're going to stop in at one of their toilet facilities. When I believe a lavatory stop is imminent, I have to madly thaw the samples down the front of my shirt (and, yes, it does feel as ghastly as it sounds).

I'm still undertaking these trials so I can't yet tell you what messages are encrypted in my mongooses' latrines. However, it looks as if the ladies (who are very status conscious) are most interested in getting the low down on one another, while the guys can't resist a lovely female poop, particularly if it's from someone they haven't met.



Bugbears enjoying themselves at the information exchange (i.e. scent-marking site).



Ware warthogs!

Photo by Arno Meintjes.

I’m writing this post for people, like myself, who felt irritated when the Lion King portrayed Pumbaa (the insouciant warthog) as living on bugs ('slimy... yet satisfying').

Alright, it was probably only me, but warthogs are grazers for Heaven’s sake!

Of the 16 pig species trotting about the world today, the warthog is the most deeply committed vegetarian.
And its veggie of choice is grass.

Look inside a warthog’s mouth and (if you can avoid losing a finger) you’ll discover a highly sophisticated grass processing plant. The incisors are designed for nipping shoots from closely cropped lawn, and behind the seriously off-putting canines (i.e. the tusks), the entire tooth row is given over to one mighty mother of a molar.
Young warthogs shed their normal piggy assemblage of premolars and molars so their third molar can grow to immense proportions. This behemoth, which is open-rooted and grows continuously, is designed to combat the gritty rasp of silica-rich grass. Even a warthog’s jaw hinges differently to that of other family members, allowing its chops to work up a good sideways swing for grass grinding.

Of course you may be wondering how such a specialised grass-muncher copes with the dry season when all the grass has withered away? Well hungry warthogs switch to rooting up the grass’s underground rhizomes and bulbs.

Now don’t get me wrong, although warthogs are connoisseurs of pasture they’ll also munch fruit and berries. But they have surprisingly conservative tastes; even when starving, they turn their snouts up at veggie scraps, apple peelings and bread (I’ll tell you about that fiasco some other time).

A warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) relishing a meal of marulas.
Photo by Brian Gratwicke.

But warthogs haven’t totally forgotten their omnivorous ancestry. This was brought home to me as I watched a large female warthog marching along a road in Kruger National Park. Up ahead, lying in the centre of the tarmac, was a road-killed squirrel.
‘Oh this will be interesting,’ I thought niavely, ‘I wonder if she’ll react?’
I imagined her pausing to give the little body a cursory sniff.

I was wrong.

As the warthog approached the body, she quickened her pace. And then, when she was still a meter away, she leapt. Yes, that’s right, leapt. It was a lightning fast strike and I gazed open-mouthed as she snatched up the dead squirrel and beat it viciously against the tarmac. I could hear the thwack, thwack, thwack from the car.
Moving at a frenzy, she hurled the squirrel high into the air and as it hit the ground she lunged forward and trampled on it, over and over, with her front trotters. It was like someone treading grapes, only ten times the speed. She repeated these manoeuvres like a creature possessed for some minutes and then, pinning the body with her front hoof, began tearing it apart.

I have to admit I was stunned. So much for darling little warthogs!

Cannibalism? No, a bit of hakuna matata; they’re grooming.
Photo by Arno & Louise Meintjes.

I was reminded of this illusion-shattering incident as I drove home from the mongooses earlier this week.
Now, I should explain that my landlord often sups on impala at his weekend braai (barbeque), and he tosses the less edible bits out for the delectation of the local vultures. So it’s not unusual for me to find myself engulfed in a flapping cloud of monstrous birds as I pass by on a Monday.

But this week the vultures weren’t enjoying their usual feast; they were all sitting waiting disconsolately in the trees.
Huh?
Was a leopard keeping them off?
A lion...?

As I got nearer I saw that a warthog family was gathered at the carcass. This sounder (comprised of two big mums and nine piglets) is one of my favourites because the little hogs are always gambolling and jousting with one another or trotting along decorously - tails raised - in single file. But this week I was a little dismayed to see them tucking in enthusiastically at the bloody remains of the impala's ribcage. Each charming little piglet - its face spattered with gore - was tugging with great vigour on the end of a rib!

With my usual aplomb as a wildlife photographer, I failed to capture the moment (although you can see a camera-trap image of warthogs munching carrion here, if you need proof of this perfidy), and the best I can offer you are ‘after shots’.

The culprits fleeing the scene of the crime.

Pissed-off vultures (white-backed) waiting for the swine to relinquish their lunch.

So next time you’re watching the Lion King, be thankful that grass-eating Pumbaa is dining on nothing worse than bugs!

Today a gerbil, tomorrow the world

The first time I saw mongooses out foraging I went into shock (well, that's a slight exaggeration).

It was back in 1995, and I was on holiday in Kruger National Park.
I'd stumbled on a group of about 25 banded mongooses and they were busily searching for dinner around my car. Each animal was scratching through the leaf litter, poking its nose into likely holes and raking around under fallen timber. Every now and again one would unearth a cricket or a juicy grub from a pile of dung or noisily crunch up a beetle.

Now this I was accustomed to.

I'd spent lots of time watching Australia's marsupial carnivores (e.g. quolls, dunnarts, antechinuses) and they obtain their takeaways in exactly the same way.

But what amazed me was that the mongooses totally ignored one another. Here they were trotting about, only a foot or two apart, burbling away companionably and moving along as a troop, but no one paid the slightest attention to what anyone else was eating!

Now if a family of quolls or a pair of dunnarts are out foraging and someone finds a tasty morsel, it's a free for all!
Everyone one dashes over and there's squeaking and brawling and utter fur-flying chaos. Heck, even dogs and cats will rush over to investigate if a companion makes a killing.

I guess, in retrospect, I shouldn't have been so shocked because flocks of birds hunt like this all the time, but mongooses have FUR for Heaven's sake!

An eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus). Quolls are Australia's best attempt at a mongoose; regrettably they're solitary and nocturnal.
Photo posted on Flickr by Shuttergirl3.

Sociality doesn't come easily to mongooses. Of the 37 species snooping about the world today, only eight (all African) have mastered the art of living together. You see mongooses are descended from a Christmas eve checkout queue of solitary, skulking killers and their physiques have remained unchanged for 30 million years.

But as the African climate dried out and savannah replaced forest, the mongooses – now perilously gadding about in the open – banded together so they'd always have someone to watch for predators. So, unlike other pack-living carnivores (such as wolves, lions or dholes), the mongooses ganged up to outsmart the beasts that ate them, rather than to up-size the beasts that they ate.

So while my little dwarf mongooses are now among the planet's most sophisticated socialites, at mealtimes their ancestral proclivity for independence shows through: everybody does their own thing, together.

Now I've explained all this, I'm going to contradict myself by describing the hour I spent with Ecthelion yesterday morning.
They were gerbil hunting - cooperatively.

I've only seen my mongooses behave this way a couple of times before, but it's always disconcerting. Their quarry, the local bushveld gerbils (Gerbilliscus leucogaster; you can see a photo of one here), live in big colonial warrens which they dig in sandy soil.
And yesterday morning, Merlin sniffed out an occupied warren. He immediately hollered for the group with a special rodent-hunting call (a bubbling, staccato version of their usual 'follow me' squeak) and the group came running. While Merlin and one or two others dug madly at the warren's main burrow entrances, everyone else milled about excitedly, watching and sniffing, pushing their noses down the many minor entrance holes, and peering under logs or into clumps of grass. They were all searching, impatiently, for any gerbil foolish enough to flee its underground home.



Putting in the spade work.



'We seek him here, we seek him there...'

Now this cooperative effort isn't exactly egalitarian because the group's reigning monarchs will filch the spoils from anyone who manages to bag a rodent. However, gerbils are big (about one-third the size of a mongoose, which makes the kill protracted, noisy and traumatic for soft-hearted observers), so lesser group members are usually able to snatch up some bloody, dismembered bits.

At the last hunt I witnessed, Koppiekats (a group of 18) snagged three of the five fleeing gerbils, and eight mongooses scrounged a meal.

The Lazy Mongoose's Guide to Gerbil Hunting.

Ecthelion's hunt wasn't successful (to my secret relief) as the gerbils refused to be flushed, and after three-quarters of an hour the 15 milling mouse-hunters were getting frustrated. Widening their search area brought them over to where I was sitting, with my backpack on the ground beside me. I should have foreseen this, but they began eyeing my bag speculatively, and I could see them thinking, 'Well if we can't find them anywhere else, they must be hiding in there'.

'"They must be in that bag..."

Soon half the group was lined up in front of me, glaring accusingly, convinced that I was harbouring their missing rodents. (Do they know me better than I realise?). Since I could think of no conceivable way to convince a group of mongooses that my backpack was gerbil-free, I shouldered the offending article and withdrew. They immediately called off their hunt ('Well, she's pinched the booty!') and headed off to forage normally.

"Gimme the gerbils!"

Now I know that dwarf mongooses hunting gerbils is not on a par with chimpanzees killing monkeys, but there's something worrying about these little creatures teaming up to bring down prey.
Sure, today it's just a few pesky gerbils, but where will this lead?
How long before I come across a felled duiker or a warthog nibbled off at the knees?
Come to think of it, aren't hyenas supposed to be descended from ancestral mongooses?
THAT'S where it will lead!

Just don't say I didn't warn you...

Finding faerie fauna

There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!
It's not so very, very far away;
You pass the gard'ner's shed and you just keep straight ahead -
I do so hope they've really come to stay.                                    

                                               The Fairies.
                                               Rose Fyleman


These are the opening lines of a poem written in the 1920s after a series of fairy photographs had taken the world by storm.

The photos were snapped by two young cousins (Elsie Wright 16 and Frances Griffiths 10) at Cottingley, England. The girls borrowed Elsie's dad's camera and photographed cardboard cut-out fairies (copied from a children's book and fixed with pegs) to persuade Elsie's mum to let them play down by the creek (where the fairies lived).
Mr Wright was so annoyed at their prank he refused them further use of his camera, but his wife believed the girls' story and passed the pictures on to the Theosophical Society. Once the society had established that the photographic plates hadn't been tinkered with, a prominent society member – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) - declared the photos authentic, sparking fierce worldwide debate.



One of the purported fairy photos:
Frances Griffiths with the Leaping Fairy.
Image source: Wikipedia.



Elsie and Frances didn't come clean for more than 60 years.

In the 1980s Frances explained,

"I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun, and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in."

This incident (dramatised in the 1997 film Fairy Tale: A True Story) illustrates our deep-seated need for magical entities. Whether they're dryads, fauns and sylphs, pixies and gnomes, or elves, ents and hobbits, we show an incredible determination to populate the natural world with mystical beings.

But why?

Do we really need nature spirits to feel the enchantment of Nature?

Living here has influenced my thoughts about this. You see it's almost impossible to venture outside without feeling like you've slipped into the world of The Magic Faraway Tree.



All around there are rustles and scurries; an eerie trembling in the grass, a twitch of foliage seen from the corner of the eye, the ever-present feeling of being watched... An eye glints from a rock crevice, a wizened face peers down from the leaves or a huge horned figure looms darkly against the twilit sky.

One of the nature spirits that live at the bottom of my garden: a grey duiker (Sylvicapra grimmia).

Of all the local nymphs, the bushbucks are the most impressive. Haunting leafy thickets, they tiptoe past with an uncanny staccato, high-stepping walk; placing each hind hoof precisely in the print of the forefoot. When alarmed they freeze, disappearing magically into the dappled underbrush. You can look straight at them and see nothing, and then, quite suddenly, there's a face! Right there, staring straight back at you. It's like those optical illusions that jump unexpectedly from vase to human silhouettes and back again, only it's a lot more startling.

A bushbuck sylph. The home-range it uses by day is completely separate from the one it haunts by night.

After experiencing the African bush, I can't help but think that it's the loss of this life-brimming habitat that's created our need for magical entities.
Maybe we conjured a panoply of nature spirits to replace the wild beasts we'd driven away, and to populate northern lands that lie bereft of fauna for half the year. Are we simply trying to recreate our ancestral home: the abundant environment in which we evolved for millions of years?

So what's prompted this reverie on the origins of faerie fauna?

Well a couple of days ago I encountered a little Elemental more adorable than any human mind could conjure.

The dogs and I were returning from our evening walk when we rounded a corner to find a newborn bushbuck lamb standing by the track. 'Standing' isn't entirely accurate; it was sort of teetering on weirdly propped legs. Only knee-high with fluffy dark fur, huge bat-ears and a puppy's wet nose, it gazed at us, all bright-eyed with curiosity. And then, to my horror, it came tottering straight toward us! Of course my dogs went berserk, straining violently at the leash in their attempt to reach it. While I wrestled wildly with the dogs, it wobbled closer and closer, stopping only a metre (3 ft) from their slathering jaws.

I didn't get a photo of this spell-binding creature (although it stood gazing at us in wonder for at least a minute) because I needed both hands to constrain the dogs. I'm sorry I didn't snap my fairy-encounter because images of day-old bushbucks are even rarer than genuine fairy photos.



An anal-retentive fairy? Baby bushbucks won't urinate or defecate unless licked by Mum, and she gulps down all predator-attracting trace evidence (nothing like maternal devotion!). This little cutie is a few days older (and much lighter) than the sprite I met.
The photo was borrowed from here.


Many of the local antelopes leave their newborns hidden in the bull-rushes shrubbery for their first few days or weeks, but bushbuck mums go to an extreme. Their ankle-biters spend four months lying out alone (I wonder if they have imaginary friends?). And they seem to have the gift of invisibility because I've never before glimpsed a bushbuck less than two months old.
So why was this little creature approaching us? In fact, why was it even tottering about at all; I was certain we hadn't flushed it from its hiding spot? Was it a starving orphan? Was it currently imprinting on my huskies, and would be scarred for life (in every sense of the phrase)?

Then the answer suddenly materialised.
Mum, who'd been standing invisibly right next to us (undoubtedly biting her nails hooves to the quick), could stand the tension no longer. She leapt away into the undergrowth, and Junior, realising that something was amiss, wobbled away after her.
I gave a huge sigh of relief.
We must have stumbled on the pair during one of Mum's twice daily visits and her little darling was so obsessed with the prospect of guzzling milk, it paid little heed to who provided it!

Now with encounters like that, who needs fairies?

Back in 1918, Frances Griffiths mailed one of her fairy photos to a friend in Cape Town (where Frances had spent much of her life). On the back of the photo she wrote,
"It is funny, I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there."

I'd suggest that there's just too much competition.

Puck? No, a young male bushbuck (Tragelaphus scriptus). Unlike other solitary antelopes, bushbucks aren't territorial (except perhaps mature males) and they enjoy a bit of company. When two meet, they greet each other cordially and mosey about together for the next hour or two.
Photo posted on Flickr by bwana4711.