Gus

My Mum used to work at CROW in Durban, South Africa. She led an amazing life there and here is an insight into it.

This entertaining story is a useful guide to anybody trying to raise a Banded Mongoose and any questions for the author, Fiona Timms can be sent here

GUS

He arrived in the clinic in the Spring of 1994. About the size of a mole, his eyes hadn’t yet opened and his fur resembled suede on his little pink body. He was a baby Banded Mongoose. Someone had heard a plaintive squeaking coming from a storm water drain on the outskirts of Durban and had found him, apparently abandoned by the troop of about 20 mongooses which use the drain as a burrow. The kind stranger had put him gently into a shoe box lined with kitchen paper and brought him to our centre for rehabilitation of wildlife.

He was icy cold and close to death so I put him down the front of my uniform blouse. This was standard treatment and our quickest solution to warming infant birds and mammals to their correct body temperature. We had successfully revived many a baby monkey and other little creatures such as bats, tree squirrels and even the small antelope called a Blue Duiker, which when new-born is the size of a cat. The babies would warm up to correct body temperature, and be safe and feel as secure as if they were back with their mother. This procedure reduced initial stress and accustomised the little wild animal to one's heartbeat and smell. It also made the first feed less traumatic as the baby was relaxed, warm and more accustomed to humans by then. The only drawback is that occasionally a nurse got nipped by one of her charges in some quite painful places. I had a baby Banded Mongoose in my shirt one afternoon (they get their teeth very young) and suddenly had to bring in a bunch of young Vervet Monkeys from their playpen outside as there was a thunderstorm brewing. My mongoose had been fast asleep but was woken up by the shrieking of the monkeys as I grabbed each one by the tail - the only way to handle Vervets without injuring them or oneself. I got sharply nipped by the mongoose inside my shirt as he panicked from the noise of the screaming monkeys.

Mongooses are fascinating small mammals and make up approximately
70% of all carnivores, and with 14 species, this is the largest subfamily in Southern Africa. On game viewing trips and safaris the smaller carnivores tend to be overlooked in favour of the large predators such as lions, leopard and cheetah, or wild dogs and hyenas. Like the wild dog, the gregarious mongooses, such as the Banded and Dwarf Mongoose as well as Suricates (Meerkats) have evolved societies that are among the most complex and co-operative to be found among mammals. The Banded Mongoose Mungos Mungo is very similar to the Indian Banded Mongoose, the species made famous by Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi.

After half an hour I was delighted to detect some movement and hear a faint squeaking from the new arrival. I made a solution of warm milk enriched with beaten egg yolk and fed it to him, using a syringe. I was pleased to see his tiny pink tongue lapping at the mixture and after he’d managed a couple of millilitres, I gently wiped him all over with a warm, damp cotton wool pad. His mother would have licked him, but I drew the line there. There was a limit to what I’d do to raise my charges successfully. I was rewarded by a faint purring. Although mongooses are of the Viverridae family in the order of carnivores, they are more closely related to wild cats than to rodents.

I named him Gus and he became a part of my life. He slept in a closed basket next to my bed. He would have preferred to have been in my bed but I made him a substitute mum out of a 2 litre Coke bottle filled with hot water and wrapped a towel around it. I tucked Gus into the folds of the towel. During the night, as the water cooled, Gus would burrow further and further towards the warmth until, in the mornings upon being woken by furious squeaking, I would unroll the towel to release him.

I had adapted a doll’s bottle by enlarging the hole in the teat with a scalpel and he would gulp down 5 ml (the equivalent of a teaspoon) of milk formula with gusto. After 4 days his eyes opened and tiny, sharp teeth appeared. His fur had grown and was a reddish brown colour and showing the first signs of his ‘bands’, a series of narrow, darker stripes across his back. The very second he was able to see, he had established every detail of my cottage, especially the small pink geckoes with which I shared my accommodation. I enjoyed having geckoes as well as the big, hairy baboon spiders in my small, prefab hut because they kept down the numbers of mosquitoes which invaded to plague me after darkness fell. Gus liked geckoes too and would follow them, chittering hopefully as they scurried, well out of reach across my ceilings and along the walls. He never gave up hope that one would lose its footing and drop down for him to catch. Unfortunately the only gecko ever to fall from the ceiling, chose to do so above a pot of soup I was boiling on my hot plate. Perhaps the steam had made the area above slippery, or it’d been overcome by the vapours, but it dropped with a plop into the saucepan.

At three weeks old, Gus was about the size of my fist and lived on my shoulder. He accompanied me in all my clinic duties. If I was feeding owl chicks, using forceps, he would run down my arm to investigate, and if I was handling monkeys he would watch from the safety of the space between my uniform collar and my neck, often hanging onto my epaulettes with his sharp little claws for extra purchase when the going got rough and I was having to catch a reluctant patient. The only place Gus was banned from was, for sterile purposes, the operating theatre when we performed any surgical procedures. Then he would be handed to a willing volunteer, where he would settle quite happily on her shoulder. On one occasion we had a television film crew in the clinic, covering the arrival of a two-week old, orphaned baby White Rhino which we were hand-raising. The reporter who was presenting the programme fell instantly in love with Gus and he spent the entire three days’ filming events happily tucked up in her ponytail.

At home with me when I was off duty, Gus busied himself by quietly rolling all the potatoes and onions out of the bottom shelf of my vegetable rack and stashing them in my shoes. Or he would watch me prepare my supper from his perch on my shoulder, giving a running commentary by squeaking with various degrees of excitement as I peeled and chopped vegetables. Garlic was his favourite and he’d go into ecstasies of loud squeaks as the aroma wafted up to his eager, twitching nose.

By then I was weaning Gus and gave him a saucer of raw mincemeat mixed with raw beaten egg. Once he had his nose in the dish he was so overcome with eagerness that by the end of his meal he was covered in food and had to be wiped down with a wet cloth, while he struggled indignantly. Gus only ever bit me once. It was on one of those occasions when he’d practically rolled in his dinner with pleasure while he was eating and was such a mess that I had to bath him. I filled a 5 litre plastic bowl with warm water and dipped him carefully in to remove some of the encrusted food before soaping him with baby shampoo. Poor Gus. He panicked and squealing and struggling, sank his needle-like teeth into my thumb. I completed his bath and while I dried him, he belly-crawled, dragging his back feet out behind in the grovelling form of apology that mongooses do to senior troop members, to make me understand that he hadn’t meant to nip me. We then played his favourite game where I would grab at his tail and he would pretend to savage my hand then run off and do a sort of victory lap, squeaking happily and racing round the grass mat on the floor of my cottage.

Gus never forgot that bath. A few weeks later I had pulled the same bowl out from under the sink , filled it with water and had tossed a couple of potatoes into it. As I was scrubbing the earth off them, Gus as usual, was watching from my my shoulder. Suddenly he became very agitated. He squeaked and hid under my collar, rushing out now an then to give little shrieks of alarm. I wondered if he’d seen a snake as the Spotted Bush snakes often slipped in through open windows or doors, unnoticed until Gus or I found them. Once I was woken from a doze on my bed on a steamy Summer afternoon by a cool snake slithering over my bare legs. The Spotted Bush snake delivers a little venom, enough to make one very ill rather than instantly dropping dead as is the case of the Black and Green Mambas. As I dried my hands on a towel and began to look for the snake to throw it out, Gus relaxed and ran, squeaking joyfully down my arm to play-bite my fingers. I realised then that he’d thought he was about to have a bath, having seen the potatoes getting theirs.

When I was eating my own supper, Gus had to be restrained in his basket with the lid down. He’d been known to run up my bare leg from the floor and along my arm to snatch at a morsel I was about to put into my mouth. He had tried the same trick with my son, Alastair who had come to stay with me. We were standing round a barbecue and Alastair was eating a chop. Gus ran up his leg and up the inside of Alastair’s Kikoi (sarong) using his sharp claws to clamber up to his shoulder and run along his arm to tug, growling ferociously at the chop in Alastair’s mouth.

Gus was learning to hunt. I had an old-fashioned bathtub with ball and claw feet and he loved to search for Whip Scorpions in the dark recesses on the floor between the tub and the wall. He would come out victoriously, wearing a grey wig of cobwebs on his small head, to crunch up his scorpion. He was still too small to tackle snakes, other than harmless little grass snakes which now and again wriggled in through the crack under my door. He pounced on these just behind the head, which he bit off immediately in true mongoose fashion. I would watch him devour his prey until just the tip of the snake’s tail stuck out of his mouth like a toothpick. He’d then wipe his mouth on the grass mat and hop onto my lap for a well-earned snooze.

One evening I was reading a book and enjoying the peace and quiet after a busy day in the clinic. Eventually I realised it was too quiet. Where was Gus? I cast my mind back to when I’d seen him last, at supper time. Calling him, I searched everywhere and then remembered that I’d seen his investigating my small fridge while I was putting things away after my meal. I opened the door of the fridge and there was Gus sitting in the lettuce crisper, eating the contents. He would have been quite happy to guzzle every morsel of food in there before squeaking to be let out. It was always my policy from then on to inspect the fridge every time I opened and closed the door, and I often caught him in mid-hop trying to get in again.

Although Gus still drank from his bottle three times a day, he was growing bigger. The time would come when I would have to release him back into the wild. To prepare him I would poke his food down the many cricket holes in the lawn outside my cottage. While he was still asleep in the early mornings I would shove his favourite bacon rinds and pieces of vienna sausage far down into the holes and then go back to let him out. I did sentry duty for him, as another member of the troop would, while he foraged, watching for dangers such as Yellow billed Kites, those agile buzzards which would snatch a small unwary mongoose. There were even different alarm barks. A certain pitch warned of danger from overhead such as eagles (he would also use that particular bark to warn me of the Boeing carrying flight 525 from Durban to Johannesburg) and another pitch for smaller birds of prey (often, in his case, single engine planes). Gus would snuffle his way across the lawn, stopping to dig, with lots of sand flying up behind him, and then return to the cottage triumphantly carrying his breakfast high, to munch it up near my feet and then off to find another one.

A few weeks after Gus arrived, I got another pair of infants to raise. These were two Genet kittens aged about ten days. The Large Spotted Genet (Genetta tigrina) is a cat-like, nocturnal member of the same Viverridae family as mongooses and thus quite a close cousin to Gus. These two kittens had been discovered in the roof of a house nearby. The householder had thought he had rats, and had sent his young son up to investigate. The boy had discovered the kittens asleep in their nest after the mother genet had bolted out of a small hole in the eaves. The householder blocked up the hole and brought the kittens to us. He didn’t want genets living in his roof as he was mistakenly under the impression that they carry rabies. This is neither true of genets nor of mongooses and meerkats, which are often killed needlessly for that reason.

At ten days the kittens’ eyes had just opened and I modified another doll’s bottle teat for them. Their formula was very similar to Gus’s and they settled in and began to thrive. I had made up a basket, like his but they wouldn't stay in there. They yowled pathetically until I let them out and decided to give them the run of my cottage. They chose a tissue box as their bed. Being nocturnal they were quite happy to squeeze through the slit of the cardboard box and sleep on top of the few remaining tissues all day. At night they commandeered the shoulder Gus wasn’t occupying, and when I went to bed they played until dawn. I got used to sleeping through thumps and scrabbling noises as they raced up and down my curtains after geckoes and launched themselves high into the air to pounce onto each other.

Gus was delighted with his new playmates and joined in their games whenever he could. To the extent that I decided to leave him at home one morning when I went up to the clinic. I came home after a few hours to find no sign of any of them. When I called, three little heads popped out of the slit in the tissue box, Gus’s slightly narrower face wedged between the distinctively marked genets’. He became nocturnal until a week or so later when Angus arrived.

Another baby banded mongoose, Angus was slightly older than Gus had been when he’d come in. Angus had fur and his eyes were already open. He was brought into the clinic inside a budgie cage, squeaking anxiously, and holding the bars of the cage with his tiny paws . I introduced him to Gus and took the genets out to the mammal cages as they were now fully weaned and needed to be isolated in preparation for release. I had really been keeping them in my cottage for Gus’s sake.

Both mongooses needed to be bottle fed and still got their dish of raw mince and egg mixture. By now I had an orphaned baby vervet monkey to bottle feed as well. I carried this particular baby around with me in a woollen shawl tied around my waist as she needed feeding frequently throughout the day and night. At home I wrapped her in the same shawl and tucked her up on a cushion, laid on the floor in case she rolled off, while I got a few chores done around the house. I was brushing my teeth one evening and heard shrieking from the monkey. On investigation I discovered both Gus and Angus had grabbed her long, furry grey tail and were dragging her backwards along the carpet in a sort of growling team effort, as they would with a prize meal they would take back to the burrow to share with the rest of the troop. I rescued the hysterical monkey and comforted her, chuckling to myself on the irony of the higher primate being so easily bullied by these two little thugs.

The breeding season was in full swing and I admitted three more baby Banded Mongooses as well as the usual number of baby Vervet Monkeys, along with many other species of mammals and birds. I now had five nearly-weaned mongooses of roughly the same age. By the time I got Fergus I was running out of names for them, and because they were to be released as part of a troop and it was now hard to tell them apart, they became ‘The Bandits’ a group name which testified to their behaviour as well. Now, when I went to feed the baby rhino every four hours, in his boma (a well-fortified pen), built especially for him in the shade of some flat topped acacia thorn trees, I was always followed by the bandits.

It was a strange procession. I would lead the way, carrying a basket and two 2 litre coke bottles filled with formula and capped with rubber calf teats. Behind me surged a small swarm of furry brown mongooses who travelled very close to my heels and ran in an odd sort of undulating motion. Hurrying in short bursts over open territory, and stopping frequently to look for danger, it looked like I was being followed by a living shadow. When I reached the boma I would stop, put down the open basket and staring up at the sky, make an alarm bark. The effect was instantaneous and the troop would dive as one into the safety of their basket. I would close the lid to ensure that they wouldn’t be trampled by Tholiwe the White Rhino, as he thundered at full gallop towards his bottles. His human foster mothers had to wait until he skidded into the sturdy poles with a crash, then slip through a specially built gap to plug the first bottle into his wide mouth.

The Bandits were ready to go up to the mammal cages and join the troop of several older Banded Mongooses brought to us under different circumstances. Hit by cars or cornered in gardens by dogs. They love dog food and frequently raid the dishes of food left outside for dogs too big to live indoors - dogs like Dobermans and Rottweilers, that don’t appreciate their dinners being stolen by mongooses. After stitching up dog bites or setting broken limbs we would put the survivors into a large sunny cage with a sandy floor and plenty of bushes, logs and toys to recuperate, before release.

I put the Bandits into a cage adjacent to the adults so they were separated only by wire mesh and left them to get on with all the calling, squeaking and marking that goes with a mongoose greeting ceremony. Marking involves dragging their hindquarters over each other and various bits of territory. They have a scent gland under the tail and this leaves a trail distinctive to each troop member. If I had introduced the Bandits to the adults by putting them into the same cage straight away, the older mongooses would have attacked and probably killed the little ones. They would have seen them as a rival troop. I intended to keep the two groups separate for a week to scent mark each other through the safety of the wire barrier and get accustomed to one another.

We had educational tours going through the centre on a daily basis and it was one morning that I was in the mammal cage giving the Bandits their morning feed. Banded Mongooses have a special trick. If one finds a bird’s egg, he seizes it between his forepaws, trundles it along the ground backwards to something large and solid like a boulder or tree trunk, then hurls the egg backwards between his hind legs, so that it breaks open with a sharp crack against the rock. I had a plate of raw eggs which I placed on the floor of the cage and told the group of waiting schoolchildren to watch carefully. Gus ran to grab an egg and proceeded to perform his party piece. I was telling the children a bit about mongoose behaviour when I received a sharp and painful crack on my shins. One of our student nurses had sneaked a golf ball in with the eggs and this is what Gus had hurled against my bare legs with some force. It had seemed to him like a perfectly good hard object to crack his egg against. The children were, of course, helpless with laughter and after that we often gave the Bandits a golf ball to throw around.

I went into the Bandits’ cage one morning, a fortnight later, and caught and covered every one of the members with deodorant from a can. Then I quickly slipped all five youngsters into the next door cage. The adults raced over to the newcomers and started marking them with their own scent glands. These older mongooses had all the skills essential for survival in the wild and it remained for us to ensure that Gus and the Bandits acquired a healthy fear of humans. Mongooses that ran, squeaking with joy towards people would inevitably end up in a cooking pot, his hide as headgear, or worst of all a live captive to be used for mTagati (witchcraft). We would only approach the cage to slip their food in, while shouting and stamping our feet to frighten them. This was always the worst aspect of preparing hand raised wild animals for release. Having gained their trust in order to mother and keep them alive in the beginning, without completing the cycle by making them fear us, would have condemned them to a life in captivity. Thus the Bandits became part of the main troop of 15 which we subsequently released in a carefully selected game reserve nearby.

A ranger reported to us that a year later their numbers had increased substantially indicating that the troop was breeding and was a viable number to survive and thrive.

Copyright: Fiona Timms 01 November 2003

November 01, 2003 in Blog , Mama

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