The Gray Ghost: The Common Mongoose

The common mongoose (Herpestes edwardsii) is present in all Indian cities, but is rarely seen. It is a fearless predator but is also shy, and avoids emerging in the open. I had caught fleeting glimpses of a mongoose on the wall of the yard from time to time, but it was always on the move and in a hurry. By the time I had returned with a camera, it was long gone. On this occasion, it was in the abandoned plot opposite our house, on the other side of the wall and close to it, eating something it had killed. I got a few shots from an upstairs window.

It is interesting that the mongoose differs from the cat in the way it attacks its prey. The cat is a master stalker; it will sink low down on the ground and inch forward toward its prey. The mongoose, on the other hand, launches a frontal attack upon sighting its prey. And unlike the cat, the mongoose will pursue a rat that has escaped to its burrow, digging it out with its long claws.

My first brush with the mongoose was indoors, within the pages of a school textbook, in Kipling's short story "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," about a mongoose that saved its adoptive human family from a cobra couple. I first thought that Kipling's imagination must have run wild: how could a mongoose kill a cobra? It was much later (those were pre-Internet days) that I learned that it was true: the mongoose will willingly take on venomous snakes like the cobra, and it usually triumphs. This unlikely outcome is enabled by the lightning reflexes of the mongoose, which time and again leaps safely out of range of the cobra's strike. After 30 minutes to an hour of this, the snake tires, and the mongoose moves in for the kill, seizing the snake's head and crushing it between its jaws.

Another factor is also at work during its contest with the cobra: the hairs on the mongoose's body stand erect, making it appear larger and more intimidating, and also, more importantly, disrupting the cobra's calculations, for even when it manages to make contact with the mongoose, all it gets is a mouthful of hair. Gray ghost, indeed! The mongoose may also have some immunity to snake venom: it usually survives a superficial bite, and only a full dose of the venom can kill it.

I think it'll be a long time before I see the mongoose again, though I know it's a neighbor, a permanent resident of the abandoned plot next door.

I consulted the excellent Wildlife Great and Small of the Coromandel by Tim Wrey while writing this.

Note: Click on the photo to enlarge it.

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