Garden Safari III: Kobus Rescues a Genet Baby

Life moves from the routine to the adventurous at the oddest and most unexpected moments. Last night, Simon and I were lying in bed reading a bedtime story when Kobus called us to come quickly. He led us out to the screened in porch that serves as our dining and living room and shone a light out into the night beyond. There, floundering in the bright beam was a tiny creature – a baby genet cat. At that point we could not discuss its provenance because it was under threat from our Jack Russell terrier. Our dog has already caught a slightly more mature genet that had to be destroyed because she broke its back so we had to move fast to restrain the dog before deciding what to do with this baby.

With the dog safely locked in our kitchen, we went outside to survey the situation. The little one was still staggering around the spot where it was first seen. Kobus then explained that he had heard it drop from the roof overhang outside. At first he thought it was one of the healthy population of bats that live in our roof but when he had a look he was surprised to discover the baby. The poor thing had fallen through a weak spot in the material that closes off the underside of the roof. There was a piece of rotted ceiling lying near the baby. I didn’t need to be asked twice to go and fetch my camera.

I handed Kobus a couple rags to protect his hands and he scooped up the little animal to see if there was any damage from its fall. It appeared to be unhurt and very docile in Kobus’ hands. It quickly moved from abject terror to only slight discomfort at this unusual turn of events in its short experience. In fact Kobus felt confident enough to let Simon touch and handle the beautiful little creature as well.

We know that at least one Small-spotted Genet (Genetta genetta) lives in our roof because we see her quite regularly sitting in the open among the shrubbery that grows on the roof and in a big tree that overhangs the roof. We’ve also seen her bounding through the garden and showing us how dexterous she is in climbing trees. The dog sits lookout for her every evening but in our own observation of her habits we’ve discovered that she’s quite aware that the dog is there and is adept at avoiding the dog’s gaze.

Genets are one of several smaller wild cats of Africa. They have larger cousins called Large-spotted genets. Apparently, there are many variations between the two to be found. We had assumed our resident is a “she” because of the earlier sad incident when the dog caught a young one. According to our field guides, little is known of genet cats beyond the most basic information. We do know that litters of young can range in size from 2-4 individuals and that genets are nocturnal hunters of insects and other smallish beasts such as scorpions. Given all the scorpions we found in our house last year and the two painful stings I suffered, we’re quite happy to have a resident family of pretty animals that are known to hunt such ugly beasts.

We surmised that this baby was between perhaps three and six weeks old. After ten days their eyes are open and at six weeks they start hunting and roaming on their own which was not quite the case with this little wanderer. We think that it was exploring the space above our ceilings when its mother was out for the night hunting. Given the docility we thought that it had not yet been weaned from its mother’s milk and was certainly not yet a hunter in its own right. Of course we were a little concerned that it would not be accepted back into the litter after having been handled but we were also drawn to it. Kobus in particular would have loved to try to hand raise it in the house. The practicalities of that would have been pretty challenging to say the least.

As our hearts warred with our minds, Simon and I held on to the little creature while Kobus climbed up to see if he could find a spot to safely put him back in the roof. Simon was obviously quite impressed with the genet baby and we were pleased with how gently he handled it. At not quite two and a half years old he has had some very interesting experiences with African wildlife.

Satisfied that he could attempt to release the baby into a spot where the roof was solid enough to hold it, Kobus took the baby from us and put him back up in the roof. We didn’t hear anything further and we haven’t found any tell-tale remains that would have indicated a less than happy ending to the night’s adventure. So we’re feeling somewhat confident that the baby found its way back to its litter mates and its mother came home none the wiser about the strange smells her baby picked up while she was out. It would be nice to be able to say that we’re 100% sure of that but all we can say is that we did the best we could and that we’re all very happy to have the memory of coming so close to such a beautiful creature that shares our home with us.

Home and Garden Safari II – Snakes!

Today I’ve been inspired to finally write the second installment of the series I started thinking about during my first months working in Africa in 1999. I finally produced the first chapter a few months ago. This week’s events have congealed the creative juices while they also stopped my heart. It is not every day that one comes face to face with an honest to goodness killer in one’s own garden.

The Puff Adder (Bitis arietans) is Africa’s most dangerous snake. It is a widespread species in Africa and often found in close proximity to human habitations. Puff adders hide themselves amongst leaf litter or ground debris on or near trails and footpaths to await their prey. They are ambush hunters of pretty much anything from frogs and lizards to mice, hares, birds and even other snakes. Their venom is cytotoxic (it destroys or kills tissue) and not necessarily lethal where good medical help is close by. Sadly, this is not the case in these rural communities and many people die every year of complications associated with their bites ranging from infection and gangrene to shock from the effects, not least of which is the extreme pain of the bite.

On Tuesday I was called to the house when I was out running some errands. I returned as quickly as possible having understood that there was a big snake in the house. Thankfully, as I got out of the vehicle I found the gardener, the guard and the maid near the fire place in the back yard. Babu, our gardener was standing over a large specimen of the above mentioned puff adder, see picture also above. I recognized it instantly. She was curled up on herself and not in an aggressive posture. Babu was patting her gently with the stiff broom he uses as a rake. The guard and the maid were not nearly as calm as the old gardener but that is to be expected. Babu was in no rush. He asked me to go and get my camera. Below is a picture of him with the enormous puff adder he caught in our garden last year.

Babu is the KiSwahili word for Grandfather. We call him that because he is an old man which is unusual in this area and deserves respect anywhere. We employ Babu full time as a gardener although due to his advanced age, we don’t expect much in the way of labour from him. Babu has a skill set that is much more valuable to us than his experience in lawn and garden care for muzungu types. He is an expert in handling snakes. Apparently he comes from the local clan that is famous as traditional snake dancers and handlers. His services are sought by all on the mine when a snake moves too close for comfort. He captures them and is rewarded for his efforts in the form of a set fee per snake. He then releases each animal safely into the deeper bush surrounding the mine. Babu also is called upon when people suffer snake bite. He uses traditional medicine techniques to treat and apparently heal victims[1].

---

[1] Babu has spoken to me at length on the preparation and use of this traditional medicine. I have written a paper on this with some anecdotal evidence of his medicines at work which can be made available to interested readers.

So, I ran into the house, collected my camera and returned to the garden to get some pictures of the most recent specimen. Puff adders are terribly beautiful. They have a very distinctive and odd shape, as the picture above demonstrates. This shape makes them move in a deceptively sluggish looking manner. The snake escaped Babu briefly during our photo session and tried to hide herself in some ground cover in a flower bed. She was brought under control more quickly than I could swallow my heart again. Once Babu had the snake’s head safely clamped in one of his confident hands (see picture left), he encouraged me to touch the snake. Their scales are described scientifically as small, overlapping and strongly keeled[1]. Her pale, wide belly scales were surprisingly leathery and tough yet extremely smooth. Those keeled scales on her back felt like organic armour. Truly an amazing thing.

---

[1] Paraphrased from Spawls et al. “A Field Guide t the Reptiles of East Africa” A & C Black, London 2004 edition

Babu put the snake in a cardboard box and tied it with a length of bicycle tyre bungee. We then placed the snake on the back seat of the car and drove away to find the mine’s safety and health officer in charge of relocation of dangerous snakes. Mr.Kapemba accompanies Babu into the deep bush that covers the mine lease area and they release the snakes together. I can not find the words to adequately describe my feelings as I drove around the town with such a dangerous snake in a box on the backseat. Both Babu and I frequently looked over our shoulders to assure ourselves of the closed box flaps. We didn’t find Mr.Kapemba at his office but thankfully his truck was parked outside the town’s tree nursery and we did find him there. The snake was dumped out of the box onto the warm concrete road for the nursery workers to have a good look and for a final photo session. Then Babu put her back in the box for her trip into the bush with Mr.Kapemba.

Unfortunately, Babu has not always been present when dangerous snakes have appeared in our garden. Thankfully, Kobus is capable of taking matters into his own hands. Simon, Kobus and I were playing outside one weekend afternoon when the guard came running. Thinking it was another relatively slow moving puff adder we all approached the spot he indicated to have a look. I didn’t see it at that point but Kobus spotted it and quickly ordered me to take Simon and the dog inside. We had a large cobra resident. It was startled into retreating into the drainage culvert that runs underneath the end of our driveway. We have no idea how long it may have been living there and preying on the abundant bird species in our yard before it was spotted. The guard explained that when he saw it, it was stalking birds.

Kobus and the guard struggled with that snake for about an hour. They built a toxic fire at one end of the culvert to force it out. The snake wasn’t having anything to do with that. It hunkered down until the fire and its suffocating smoke was just too much. Finally it started approaching the other end of the culvert. The snake would stick its head out of the culvert and, correctly assessing the danger of exiting, would retreat. Eventually, knowing that the snake was close to the end of the culvert, Kobus stuck the guard’s shotgun into the culvert and fired. The wounded snake finally left the culvert at which point Kobus decided that it was mortally wounded and safe enough for me to come out of the house and take some pictures from a distance. In the picture on the left Kobus holds the then headless carcass up against himself to measure the considerable length of the animal. Kobus is over six feet tall. While it is unfortunate that this mature snake lost its life, we can’t let such a dangerous snake live in our garden. Mwadui is notorious for its large healthy populations of puff adders and cobras.

We are living with a family of non-venomous snakes that we started to discover a couple weeks ago. We have a lovely screened in porch on the back of our house that serves as our living and dining room. It has double doors that open on the garden. Upon opening one of these doors early one morning, Kobus had a small snake fall on him and slither into a crack between the concrete slab of the house and the step into the garden. A few days later, he caught an identical little snake in the same place and released it into the bush at the back of our garden. On Monday of this week, another little snake appeared in the same place and he caught it and put it in a jar. We kept it in the jar for a day which allowed me to take some pictures and identify it as a White-lipped snake (Crotaphopeltis hotamboeia). The presence of the little snakes in our doorway made good sense as they eat frogs. We’ve had as many as 20 frogs, no bigger than 2.5cm long lining the doorframe on any given morning for the last couple months. However, there had been a sharp decline in their population for a few weeks and now we knew why.

I showed Babu the little snake in the jar when he arrived to work that day. He was very impressed at Kobus’ snake wrangling skills but was a little skeptical of my identification of our specimen as non-venomous. That is also understandable because our experience is that this snake acts very much like a venomous snake. Our book informs us that it is indeed aggressive and will inflict a nasty bite. However, the danger from such a bite is infection and not venom. Later that same day, Babu found a larger version of the same snake. We agreed that it was probably the mother of the little ones that live in the doorway of our porch. She was seriously wounded. Part of her tail was missing and we suspect that our dog was the culprit. We’ve known our little Jack Russell to kill at least one other snake. Babu put the injured snake in a box and cycled her out to a safer place in the bush. We have no idea if she will survive.

It seems that this time of year is when the snakes that share our environment make themselves seen. Most of our snake sightings have been between June and August in the little more than a year that we have lived in this location. They are probably on the move looking for water and warm places to sun themselves. I am very grateful to Babu for his ongoing vigilance in safeguarding our family against dangerous snakes and I am also pleased that he has been able to remove them to places where they can carry on with their existence. I think it is best when we can all go about our business out of each others’ way.

Tanzanian Tales V: Home & Garden Safari I

Home and Garden Safari I

I’ve been threatening to write about my on-going garden safari for ages now. The reason that I haven’t produced said document is because it is a rather more ambitious project than I first imagined. Having given up on producing it all at once, this will be the first of many chapters. I dedicate this series to the memory of my Grandma who’s constant curiosity and wonder at the world around her will always inspire me.

“Safari” is a KiSwahili word meaning “to travel.” When you are about to embark on a journey people wish you “safari njema” meaning “travel well or safely.” When you return from your journey people ask “habari safari?” which literally translates as “what is the news from your journey?” The polite answer to this is “mazuri sana, habari yako?” which means “very good, what is your news?”

When we go on a safari as it is more widely understood, we generally travel into a protected African wilderness. Upon entry into these wilderness areas, we are given or buy or find in the guidebooks that have brought us to these places, a list of the birds, animals, bugs, reptiles and even sometimes plants and rocks that the wilderness area provides homes for. As tourists we find ourselves scanning these lists and ticking off the birds and animals we see. Sometimes we mark with a star those that we enjoyed the most or got good pictures of. I find myself wondering what the African guides who first saw tourists frantically ticking away thought of our headlong antics. Of course by the time I’ve visited any of these areas, the guides (when we’ve used their services) have been well used to our ways and have consulted the lists themselves in planning and prioritizing where to take us to make sure we got to tick as many as possible – thereby maximizing their tips.

Having spent my formative years in a Northern Hemisphere climate where winter has a significant limiting effect on the lengths to which life can grow, I consider the adventure of housekeeping in the Tropics a journey in discovery and wonder at the amazing variety and size that life can take. From a North American perspective, when Africa is not about chaos and poverty, it is about the incredible environments and ecology found here. It is no coincidence that questions about the animal and plant life are those that most frequently come up when people in Canada ask me what it is like to live in the African bush.

All this is to explain the inspiration behind what will hopefully become a series of pictures and words. Since I’ve been living and working in African countries, I’ve been collecting pictures of the plants, animals, bugs and birds that populate my home and garden. That is not to say that our homes and gardens in wintery places are not also places full of wonder and discovery. However, the sheer abundance and tenacity of life inside and outside my homes in Africa has in turns excited, revolted, terrified and mostly just simply amazed me. I’ve wanted to share this wonder with people all the way along. The following is an excerpt from my journal to start us all off with a particularly tenacious creepy crawly that we see around once in a while.

Eye spitter beetles are aptly named because they can secrete and even propel a noxious smelling acidic liquid when they feel threatened. They are member of the carabidae family of insect order coleoptera and can grow to and impressive 6cm long. The one in this picture had obviously seen a few fights given the damage on its shell near the end. Its body was about 5cm long. It may or may not have been the one who met its end in the following excerpt from my journal. The picture was taken in our bathroom a couple nights before the journal entry.

Monday 14 November 2005 21:00, Mwadui

Eulogy to the eye spitter beetle that died sometime today. Last night around this time I was getting ready for bed and discovered, to my horror, a largish specimen of the so called eye spitter beetle hanging on the net over Kobus’ pillow. Given that Kobus was home, I delegated the task of this potentially messy eviction to him. Kobus turned on the naked bulb that serves as the overhead light in our bedroom and chased the monster under the bed. The light, combined with our debate over weather the job was done briefly woke Simon. Reckoning the bug “lost” Kobus adjourned back to the couch while I managed to send Simon quickly back to sleep with some gentle words and a soothing touch.

Having already turned off the offending light I then applied my red maglite torch to the problem. I found the intruder at the foot of the bed still under the net. I asked Kobus to return and remove the beast while I shone the light on it. In his pique at being roused from the couch for the second time in ten minutes, he decided to kill it and selected one of his hunting boots for the task. The net came between the bug and the boot when he thwacked it and its defensive liquid plus whatever other interior innards made an ugly brown stain half the size of my palm on the net plus another stain half the size of the first one. The carcass was allowed to lie where it was thwacked. In the morning I decided that such an awful mess deserved some forensic photography. (Gentle readers: you’ve been spared these shots because none of the pictures represented the situation adequately in my opinion.) As I went about my photographic project, I moved the bug so that I could get shots of the body with the stains in the frame. I was again horrified when I discovered that the poor beast was still alive. I had to call Kobus at work to inform him of my discovery. He said: “well good luck to it.” That being said, I didn’t give it much thought again until I discovered the carcass lying just outside the back door where the maid must have left it when she swept the dirt out of the house this morning. It was completely dead by then and the ubiquitous ants were busily carrying it away tiny piece by ant-bite piece. Somehow such a tenacious beast deserved a couple paragraphs of my time.