Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

" WHERE the water is shallow and not too still, in estuaries and by sand-spits and the margins of lakes, the LARGE EGRET seeks its patient living. It is a solitary bird and likes a fair stretch of knee-deep water - but so do other waders more sociably inclined. Even when it finds a quiet creek, away from ibises and spoonbills and storks, it is rarely altogether free from the companionship of its cousins.

From these cousins it is distinguished by its size and carriage. Our egrets differ from herons in being all white - one of them, the Cattle Egret, has turned pastoral and moreover it does not belong to genus Egretta. But the Large Egret, the Smaller Egret and the Little Egret are all waders and all white, with exquisitely dissected plumes adorning them during the breeding season.

It is not easy to tell the two lesser egrets apart at a glance, highly sociable birds both and often found in the same places. Indeed, the difference between them is especially slight when they are not breeding, and the Little Egret lacks the Smaller Egret's distinctive, drooping, nuptial crest. The yellow feet of this bird contrast sharply with its black legs and are conscious in flight, but this may not serve to distinguish it always. However, there is no mistaking the lone Large Egret.

If you see a gleaming white bird, the size and shape of a grey heron but more daintily made, stepping warily over the shallows by the shoreline, you may safely put it down as a Large Egret. Its long, slim neck is thrust well forward and even in repose it stands less upright than a grey heron - when it walks, the horizontal leaning is more pronounced and at times the bird seems almost on the point of toppling over!

Not that it is ever in danger of losing its balance. It is a canny bird and knows that fish and tadpoles and such underwater things that it hunts, are suspicious of sudden splashings. So it lifts its black feet clear of the surface and moves carefully forward through the air before setting its legs down gently through the water again: it cranes forward and prospects the shallows ahead and, when the prey is near enough, a lightning plunge with the poniard bill secures it.

After summer, this deft bill turns from black to yellow and with the plumes of love fallen, the humped back and abruptly tapering end of the tail are plainly visible. A Tamil poet who lived some 2,000 years ago has likened the shape of an egret standing huddled in the water during the rainy season to the bud of the water-lily - from afar and from June to November the simile seems strikingly true to life.

Incidentally, the aigrettes that were once so much in demand among fashionable ladies in Europe are the nuptial plumes of egrets - the Smaller Egrets being the most abundant provider. The plumes were collected humanely, without injury to the valuable birds, at egret farms near villages. With aigrettes going out of fashionable in the West, probably on account of a false sentimentality, egret farming has ceased to be thriving industry. The birds, however, continue to thrive and are rarely disturbed at their breeding sites by villagers, who consider the water fouled by a nesting colony excellent for the fields."

- M.Krishnan


This was first published on 9 August 1953 in The Sunday Statesman

*The sketch of the bird not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

"Lord, suffer me to catch a fish
So big that even I,
In telling of it afterwards,
Shall have no need to lie.

So runs the Fisherman's Prayer. With two words substituted for "catch" and "fish" this could also be the prayer of all big game hunters. Many of them, of course, may be unaware of the wish in their hearts- till the have bagged something near record size.

I am no big game hunter; only a naturalist. The difference does not lie merely in my comprehensive lack of skill with gun and rifle. I am apt to find a smallish tiger quite as exciting as one that would be (when dead) a clear 10 feet between pegs and, worse still, a jackal equally interesting on occasion. The compensation for my lowly estate is that I am unlikely to magnify the proportions of an animal that I watch or of one, shot by someone else, that I measure or weigh. this personal and defensive preface is necessary because I am writing of the most versatile and varied of big game beasts, the leopard or panther (the terms are synonymous now, and the Indian and African leopard, identical specifically).

Which is the record specimen of the panther? This is a question that is simultaneously easy and almost impossible to answer, with certainty. If newspaper reports can be trusted, the Hyderabad monster puts all others of its kind, and almost all tigers to shame. According to a news agency report widely circulated in South India, Mr. MK Vellodi, then Chief Minister of Hyderabad, bagged a man-eating panther at Narsapur on 13 May 1951, that was 10.5 feet long.

However, if we are to limit ourselves to prosy facts, the question is hard to answer. In assessing the size certain difficulties arise with panthers that are less difficult with other creatures, including the tiger. For even where length between pegs and weight are both available (which is unusual), the length of the tail varies so much in panthers that unless it is also specified one can get no idea of the bulk of the specimen. Dunbar Brander, a most trustworthy authority, says the tail may vary in length from 28 to 38 inches, and since it is independent of body size, one can never say that even a 7.5 foot panther is a large specimen without knowing the length of the tail.

Again, weight is affected by the condition and whether or not the panther has killed and fed recently. A big panther weighs about 150 pounds, and some 25 pounds of this weight may depend on whether it is gorged or unfed- in a tiger there would not be the same proportionate difference on this account.

After stressing the variations in size and coat that can obtain in panthers, Brander says, "Purely jungle leopards, those living entirely inside the forest and never resorting to open country and villages, are often of larger size and adopts the habits and ways, and to some extent the colourisation, of tigers. They have yellow tawny coats, relatively fewer spots and rosettes, and are distinguished by jungle tribes as 'gol baghs' or 'spot tigers'. An average specimen of this type "measured 7 ft 5 in and weighed 152 lb".

This distinction between the larger and heavier forest-loving game killer and the panther haunting the purlieus of villages has been reiterated by most subsequent writers. A recent note in a scientific journal refers to this difference and mentions a panther " 8 ft 5.5 inch in length" (between pegs?). Rowland Ward, I think, records longer animals and one that weighed 160 lbs. I remember reading somewhere of a nine-foot panther- but probably this measurement was very much round the curves.

I have measured the length, between pegs, of certain large panthers shot in the Deccan during the past 10 years, and where there were facilities for accurate weighment I have weighed them. Here are the details from my notes.

Two males shot within 15 minutes of each other on the evening of 14 September 1947, from the main bus road near Chilkanahatti measured 7 ft 1.5 in (tail 32 inch) and 7 ft 5 inch (tail 36 inch) and weighed 132 lbs and 121 lbs after 24 hours- neither was gorged. The first of these was a very powerfully built old beast, with a big domed head, a close dark coat and no white and all on the face or throat, even the chin and jaws and inside of the ears being yellow ochre. He crossed the road in the light of the setting sun right in front of two experienced shikaris, a few minutes before he was shot, and both identified him as a tiger!

I should mention two remarkable animals from Sandur hill jungles. Both were chance-met males, shot from the road very near human settlements. The first, shot about sunset on 13 June 1948, was 7 ft 7 in between pegs and was a low, longish panther, obviously old and with the right lower canine broken. It had the most remarkable coat I have ever seen on a panther, with the hair soft and somewhat fuzzy- the ground colour was no shade of yellow or brown, and in most panthers, but a light warm grey, and there was no line of solid spots down the spine, the markings consisting mainly of large rosettes, some of them double rosettes with an inner cluster of fine spots within the outer circle. The illustration* is from a rough sketch of the beast.

The second panther is probably a record, for South India at any rate. It was shot on the night of 25 July 1951, by the Yuvaraja of Sandur, and had a tucked in empty stomach. Length- 7 ft 8 inch between pegs (lowest of the three measurements), tail (root to tip) 35 inches; shoulder to toes of forelegs, 33 inches; girth behind forelegs, 36 inches; weight 158 lbs. The colouration was normal.

The interesting thing about these four panthers (and other large animals from the same areas) is that none of them was a pure game killer, a forest-loving "gol bagh". All four were shot very near villages, from the main road, and three were definitely known to prey, occasionally, on village cattle and dogs. In Karwar, where there is real forest (there is only bush jungle in Chilkanahatti) the few panthers I have seen were small and long-tailed- two males I measured were 6.5 feet, and very light, with beautiful, dark coats.

Whatever may be the general rule in Central Provinces, the "gol bagh" distinction does not appear to hold in the Deccan, and it is unsafe to specify any colouring as being typical of panthers of any region. Heredity seems to play a much larger part than environment in determining the size and colour of the panthers of any area. Sufficient food during the period of growth (and even afterwards) is a vital factor of course."
- M.Krishnan

This was first published on 22 November 1953 in The Sunday Statesman


*The sketch of the leopard not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

" BLACK birds, as a rule, are glossy. Look at the King-crow, the Racket-tailed Drongo, the Cock-koel and Robin - even the homely crows have a shine to their darkness, like a glace-kid shoe. Some black birds are even more fancy, the sheen of their plumage having a iridescence; the Hill-mynah's black is shot with flashes of purple and green, the little Sunbirds have a gem-like purple glow, and many other birds have a watchspring-blue gloss to their blackness.

But the cock Pied Bush-chat is not like that. Its black is shineless and gentlemanly, and sets off the patch of white in each wing and above the tail so neatly and brings out stubby little figure so trimly. Its mate is even more sober in attire, the colour of sun-baked, brown clay.

It is scrubby country, given to spiky, stony vistas framed by thorn-bush, that the Bush-chat likes best; and here it will often take up residence, with its mate, around one's home. So will many other birds, but I think that none of them can impart to a modest cottage set in a plot of wasteland and the same sense of cheer. I should know, having lived for years in such a dwelling.

For seven years, a pair of Pied Bush-chats lived close beside me, till I left. Each year they built their nest in the vicinity, in a cleft in the kitchen wall, in the roof of my goatshed, and once in the axle-hole of an enormous, handleless, stone roadroller that lay permanently unrolling on my wiry "lawn" - that brood, I remember, came to grief soon.

Robins, many Wagtails, Sparrows, Bulbuls, Sunbirds - all sorts of birds would come to the curious, low circular wall that enclosed my house or to the aloes and the few hardy bushes that I succeeded in cultivating.

But it was the Bush-chats that were the permanent residents and I was glad this was so; they were such quiet, self-assured and confiding tenants, unlike the giddy, fidgety visitors.

During summer and even during the cold weather (especially in December) the cock bush-chat would take its stance atop the terrace, or on a mast-like strip of plank from a packaging case that somehow came to adorn the roof of the goatshed, and sing his glad brief song - a loud clear rising whistle ending on a note of untamed sweetness.

Listening to it on a sultry afternoon, I have often felt convinced that there is more to birdsong than scientists know yet, and there are times when a bird sings merely because it can and feels like it.

I know that scientifically-minded people will shake their heads sadly over this little tribute to a lost friend; they will tell me that it is a projection of my own emotions, a sickly and unworthy sentimentality that is responsible for this note.

No matter. I knew these chats for years and they did not - and if science is the elimination of all feeling and perception and an unwillingness to believe what is not printed in a book, then I have no use for it."
-M.Krishnan

This was first published on 20 December 1953 in The Sunday Statesman

*A nice sketch of an Oriental Magpie Robin in b/w not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

" THROUGHOUT India and even far beyond, where the country is sufficiently dry, stony and scrub-jungly, you will find a brownish, much-streaked bird with enormous eyes trotting over pebbly riverbeds on long yellow legs, scuttling through the scrub, crouching low and merging instantly with the earth.It is a bird of many aliases, all of the descriptive and non-flattering.

It is the Stone-Curlew, the Thick-knee or the GOGGLE-EYED Plover, it is the "bastard-florican" of Anglo-Indian sportsman - I have even heard it called "bastard-florican". However it is ornithologists that have been least kind to it. Formerly it was termed 'Oedicnemus scolopax', but apparently it was felt that the second, specific part of the name was too easy; so now they call it 'Burhinus oedicnemus'!

Thick-kneed-goggle-eyed-bustard-plover-stone-curlew would be completely descriptive. The bird has the three-toed, yellow running legs of the bustards, and carries the body horizontally; when it runs, with quick, mincing steps, its head low, in a line with the body. By day it is inactive, especially when the sun is bright and cover scanty, but as the light fails it emerges singly and in pairs, moving on quick, silent feet through the scrub looking for insects.

The obliterative plumage is almost invisible in the dusk, but you may hear it, for with nightfall it grows vocal and often keeps calling till quite late, especially when the moon is bright. And listening to its wild, high, repeated "curlew, curlew", a call suggestive of desolate, wide wasteland, you know at once why it is called the Stone Curlew.

In places it is only less common on the night road than the nightjar. When caught in the beams of incoming car, it scuttles to the shelter of the nearest bush and stays put beneath it, only its big, black-and-yellow eyes betraying it- or else it flies swift and low for a short distance, the white bar in each wing clearly displayed, before touching ground again and scuttling away. It never flies high or far when disturbed, for it is a ground bird that trusts its thick-kneed legs, but I have heard a pair flying fairly high and calling to each other in the cold, clear moonlight.

Often a bird disturbed at night on the road will fly alongside the car or right over it, before turning away, somewhat in the manner of the nightjars. Once i caught one from an open lorry, putting up my hand as it came skimming over, and what impressed me was the way it went limp and yielding in the hand, and its surprising lightness. Most bird lack weight remarkably in the hand, but I think, the Stone-Curlew (it is definitely larger than the partridge) is exceptionally light, even for a bird.

I would like to know more about the courtship of this earth-loving bird, whether that is terrestrial. Does love inspire its wings at anytime or was it just the moonlight that exhilarated the birds I heard, more than once, flying high? Growing curious on this point I questioned a number of people who lived where these birds are common. They could tell me nothing, but directed to a gang-foreman whose knowledge of the fowl was said to be considerable. After missing a few opportunities, I met this expert at last, and this was what he told me, "Yes, they can fly, but that's not the point. Sometimes they fly a little, and sometimes a little further, but mostly they like to run. The point, however, is this: try them cold in a sandwich."

Unfortunately, I am a vegetarian and can add no personal recommendation, but that was the expert advice."
- M.Krishnan

This was first published on 24 January 1954 in the Sunday Statesman.

*The beautiful sketch of a pair of the birds is not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK : M. Krishnan : Why it's called the pangolin : The Sunday Statesman : 8 March 2015
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WHY IT'S CALLED THE PANGOLIN

"THE oddest of our wild animals, I think, is the Pangolin, or, Scaly Ant-eater. Even among domestic beasts, where some fancy varieties have been bred, there is nothing quite so odd.

Taxonomically, Pangolins belong to the primitive order of "toothless" animals that includes the ant-eaters, armadillos, and sloths of Tropical America, and the aardvark of South Africa (familiar to most crossword puzzle addicts), an order that is more a jumble of curious beasts with no front teeth than one with strong generic affinities. However, it is true that all the beasts belonging to this order have no front teeth: some, like the Pangolins, are wholly toothless, and others have only very poorly developed cheek-teeth.

Was it Champion who called our pangolin "an animated fircone" ? I am not sure if it was, but that terse description is quite adequate. Only the animated cone is almost four feet long when on its feet, and curled into a tight spiral, when the resting or in a self-defensive attitude, with the head tucked in on the breast and the powerfully-muscled, powerfully-scaled prehensile tail outermost. The abdomen of the pangolin in naked, with no protective armour of the superimposed triangular scales, and naturally it covers this area with its tail when it curls up. It has been said that the pangolin is a slow mover, walking on its knuckles with a shuffling gait, with the heavy tail raised clear of the ground, and it is almost entirely nocturnal. It is true that being clad in a heavy suit of scale mail, it cannot gallop or even trot and that moving on the knuckles of the forefeet (with the great, inwardly-directed claws not touching the ground) and the flat soles of the hind feet (which have blunt, thick claws), it does shamble as fast as a man normally walks. And though pangolins are mainly nocturnal, they have been seen abroad early morning, after the sunrise.

Pangolins are not forest animals entirely - in fact, they are commoner in scrub jungles and jungles clothing the bases of hills. But they are seldom seen, being very shy of daylight, and spend the day curled up in repose deep down their burrows.

So far as I know, pangolins live entirely on ants and termites and their eggs. They dig up anthills with their strongly-clawed forefeet and are expert at burrowing. They live in tunnels dug by themselves, often nearly 20 feet long!

The pangolin in the picture was an adult male, brought to me by a gipsy. When placed six feet up on horizontal limb of a tree, it promptly tumbled down, landing on its arched back every time so as to break the fall. However, a pangolin can climb quite well when it wants to. It found an ants' nest in my garden and had quite a hearty feed, darting its long, glutinous, vermiform tongue in and out to lick the ants, which it dug up with its feet. It was not at all frightened of us, and it was with difficulty that we got it curl up for a defensive portrait.

One thing I noticed about this creature was its sure sense of direction. Pangolins are said to go mainly by a sure sense of smell, but this one was able to find its way back to that ants' nest, with little circumambulation, when it was lifted bodily and removed, round an angle of the house to different corners of the compound.

We learn very little about the ways of wild animals by our studies of captive specimens, and often misjudge their capacities because, because, in captivity, they are just not themselves. With creatures like pangolin, highly adapted to a limited sort of life and hard to observe in their native haunts, captive specimens have provided most of the information we have.

This naturally leads one to presume that their lives are even more restricted then they are. In fact, we know precious little about pangolin's private life, and its likes and prejudices. I am afraid we do not even know why it is called "pangolin". My dictionary, which provides such information in a terminal note set in a smaller, different type that somehow smacks of superior knowledge, is discreetly silent on the point. This leaves me, for the first time, with a feeling of ascendancy over my dictionary, for I think I can guess why the pangolin is called the pangolin. It must be that that is the name of the animal in Chinese, for that that is not its name in any of the many languages or our country! "

- M. Krishnan

This was first published on 11 January 1959 in The Sunday Statesman

#One photograph of a male pangolin not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan : The Hill Maynah : The Sunday Statesman : 01 March 2015
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THE HILL MYNAH

" THE Grackle or Hill Mynah is one of those birds which most people know better in a cage or aviary than in the native jungles for it is widely celebrated as a talker and a mimic. In fact, many consider it as finest mimic among birds, and it is not only in our country that it has this unique reputation - it belongs almost exclusively to India, but every cage-bird fancier in the rest of Asia, and in Europe, and in America, knows it.

However, I am no cage bird fancier, and I can tell you that few birds revel more in their freedom. It is not in every hill range that you can find the Hill Mynah, it lives exclusively in the treetops, and it is in well-wooded forests, above a certain elevation, that it makes its home. Though a most accomplished mimic with a considerable repertoire of clearly enunciated phrases and snatches of tunes when trained, in nature it has no song, nor even many calls - the commonest of these is a loud, rich, long-drawn call, suggestive to the human ear and mind of zestful joy. It is a bird that goes about in pairs and small parties, flying from tree to tree on quick wings.

At Siruvani, on the borders of Palghat and Coimbatore, I spent an afternoon last year on the shore of a dam-fed lake. The elevation of that place was not great, about 3500 feet or so, and the vegetation there suggested, except for the clumps of bamboos, an evergreen forest. Lofty trees, such as Poon, towered to the skies and the undershrub was succulent, broad-leaved and darkly green. The lake, reflecting the vegetative luxuriance that ringed it, was a deep viridian, with a sudden transition to cerulean in the middle where it mirrored the sky, and when a breeze stirred its surface there were ripples of glinting silver all over. I spent hours at this delightful spot, watching two pairs of Hill Mynahs.

They will perch on a leafless bough on top of the great tree beneath which I sat, coming out from time to time with low musical conversational sounds, varied by a harsher, more guttural note. Then one pair will fly away, with a brief warbled call, very reminiscent of the trisyllabic flight-call of the Common Mynah, but richer in tone; they will fly straight and fast, the white-banded wings whirring right across the lake to a tree on the other bank, almost a furlong away. I could see them quite clearly through my binoculars, but frequently they disappeared into the foliage of that tree, possibly to feed on their fruit - I could not identify that their rich-toned, fluent call will come clear across the water, and presently the pair on my tree will depart, with their quickly-warbled flight-call, to join their companions, or else to find their way to some other tree on the further bank.

Often the birds would fly right away, beyond the field of my vision, but invariably they returned to my tree, to perch on the naked top bough. Even in the open, beneath a clear sky, they looked black all over except where the sun touched up an irridescent green or purple highlight in the plumage, but the cadmium yellow of the wattles and the beak and the legs stood out clear against the dark body. The Southern Hill Mynah, not quite so long, but squatter and heavier in build.

These Hill Mynahs, are not, in point of fact, closely related to the true Mynahs, that they resemble superficially. They are classed apart in a family by themselves, and even in their habits they differ much from the ground-loving Mynahs, which eat quite a lot of insect food besides fruits. Hill Mynahs are wholly arboreal and are fruit-eaters. In captivity they are sometimes fed a little finely minced meat, and while it seems to do them no harm (any bird that eats figs takes in , willy-nilly, a certain amount of larval fare), I doubt if it does them any good.

Hill Mynahs seem to keep themselves to themselves, even outside taxonomical classifications. So far as I know, they do not seem to associate with other birds, as the true Mynahs do freely, at fig-tree feasts. Incidentally, they are by no means birds confined to evergreen forests. I have never seen so many Hill Mynahs as in the deciduous forests of Mudumalai, where the picture I offer was taken."

-M. Krishnan

This was first published on 28 December 1958 in The Sunday Statesman


#The photograph of pairs of Hill Mynahs perched on a leafless bough on top of a great tree is not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M. Krishnan: A tongue a cubit long : The Sunday Statesman :22 February 2015
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A TONGUE A CUBIT LONG

" IN many Indian languages, a long tongue signifies impertinence, especially the young, the lowly and others expected, by a fading tradition, to observe a respectful silence while their elders and betters gabble. Not so in Tamil, length of tongue something different, an epicurean love of food, particularly in the phrase, "a tongue a cubit long" that denotes a shrewd discrimination in things to eat.

Judged by that Tamil phrase, the HIMALAYAN BLACK BEAR in the picture must be a regular gourmet - and it is! It wanders far in search of titbits, climbs trees for honey, knows where the market-gardener has grown his peas and often indulges a taste for red flash and choice insect fare. The much wider distributed SLOTH BEAR, too, is choosy in its feeding; it will dig a foot-and a half into the soil for the sake of a beetle grub, excavate deep into an anthill to finally at the queen and climb the wild date palm to drink the toddy from the tapper's suspended pot (in places where Prohibition does not obtain, of course!) It has aptly been called an expert field-botanist for it knows just where and when to find the fig and the ber and the jamoon fruit and mohwa flowers.

Both these bears are bulky beasts and need plenty of sustenance and to find the varied titbits they like they often travel far and work hard. But of course they do guzzle more easily obtained food as well and indulge in a great feast when they strike it rich, as when they find their way into an orchard or a field of corn.

Talking of gourmets among our wild animals, I would leave out those creatures, like the Pangolin ( though the pangolin does have a long tongue! ) that are highly specialised in their feeding habits - they are faddists, not gourmets! Most of the predators may also be left out for they have limited choice of food - raw flesh is much of a muchness and even when it is something they fancy especially, predators usually bolt their food and do not chew and relish it. However within these limitations they do have strong preferences. Cattle-lifting TIGERS like a well-fleshed cow or bullock if they have the choice and both TIGERS and LEOPARDS ( which, like all hunters, have to keep very fit to find and to kill their prey and instinctively avoid all risks of potential injury ) lose their habitual caution when they sight the prickly, plump porcupine - at times they get quite badly stuck and are disabled or even die, in consequence.

It is among the herbivores and omnivores that we find the real epicures. Most of the herbivores need plenty of food and crop or browse steadily with little evidence of leisured relish. However, they do have decided tastes. Many of us like the bitter gourd in a curry and some like its bitterness unmitigated by too much spicing or jaggery, but no man is as fond of the fruit as the BLACK BUCK is. In the Tungabhadra area, it was by setting snares for them in patches of wild bitter gourd that the trappers exterminated local buck. Many ANTELOPES and DEER have powerful likes in the matter of herbs, leaves and fruits they eat, but none, I think, is as particular as the MUNTJAC or barking deer.

Incidentally, the deer has a tongue almost a cubit long, which it wraps around a twig and then draws down to strip it clean of tender leaves! It has been said that occasionally this deer will eat the dead meat. Once I watched a muntjac feeding for almost an hour; it never stopped long at any place, and covered much ground with a nibble here and nibble there, seeking and finding choice buds and shoots and herbs.

Even the ELEPHANT, which needs such quantities of fodder everyday, can be quite a gourmet. Pad-elephants which I got to know loved ripe bananas, wood-apples dried dates and sugarcane but rejected guavas and the nelli fruit (amla). Incidentally, wild elephants are very fond of the jackfruit which they crush open to get at the sweet, pulpy segments within, leaving the spiky, glutinous rind.

It is among the omnivores that we come across some of the nature's choosiest eaters. Many RODENTS are omnivorous, eating a certain amount of animal food besides plant food. The common PALM-SQUIRREL, is given to a much more varied diet than most people think and uses much cunning and climbing skill to get what it wants. I hope to make a report on its feeding habits in this column in due course, but the point I now wish to make that we know little about the gustatory preferences of even such a common and garden creature.

Sometimes observation reveals unexpected tastes and experiments yield quite surprising results. The ''MUSK-RAT '' which runs about our homes is really the MUSK-SHREW, and a true insectivore, subsisting on cockroaches, crickets, termites, worms and such small fry.

Intrigued by finding it so often in rat-traps baited with coconut or sweet biscuits, I carried out an investigation, only to discover that the musk-shrew has a decided sweet tooth and loves anything with sugar or honey in it!

MONKEYS, specially the omnivorous macaques, are sometimes fastidious in their feeding. Though the Bonnet Macaque feeds on many kinds of grain, fruit and herbage (including tender leaves of the tamarind) which it has little difficulty in finding, when it comes to the corrinda (and the closely allied Carissa caranadas) fruit it will spend hours in going from bush to spiky bush carefully picking each purplish ripe berry between fore-finger and thumb and then stuffing it into the cheek-pouch.

And I have seen this monkey climb a tamarind to drink the water held in a hollow high up the tree by the laborious process of flipping the water up with a hand and catching the droplets in its open mouth when there was a pond with stone steps close by at which it could have slaked its thirst much more comfortably - water that has been in contact with the wood of tamarind or nelli trees has a sweetish taste.

But of course no animal goes to the lengths that man does in his gustatory orgies. I may be mistaken but though I can find nothing definite about it in books I have, is n't it a fact that both human history and dentition go to show that man is essentially an omnivore? "

- M.Krishnan

This was first published on 21 December 1958 in The Sunday Statesman


# The photograph of the Himalayan Black Bear is not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK : M. Krishnan : The mongoose-cobra fight : The Sunday Statesman : 11 January 2015
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THE MONGOOSE-COBRA FIGHT

"SO much has been written already about the mongoose-cobra fight that unless one has something new to say there is no point in saying anything at all. And even if one has something new, it is impossible to say it without covering the old ground.

Clearly one of those situations that Shakespeare summed up admirably add to the embarrasment of grammarians in the famous lines:

If it were done when 'tis done,
then 'twere well
It were done quickly.

Here, then, is the resume of the fight as reported by observers ranging from Jardon and Kipling to Sunday magazine photographers. In the fight, the mongoose rely on sheer agility and not, the legend would have it, on a herb which it knows and whose leaves, well chewed, are a sure remedy for snake-bite. It is also helped by its thick, harsh, pepper-and-salt coat - the bristled hair magnifies the size of the mongoose and causes the cobra to strike 'short', and to some extent the coat prevents the fangs sinking into the flesh, even if the snake does succeed in getting in a bite. Furthermore, mongooses, like hedgehogs and pigs, are less susceptible to snakebite than most mammals. However, it is its superior agility that serves the mongoose best in the encounter. It hurls itself aside when the snake strikes, sometimes turning a somersault in its haste, and when the cobra is somewhat spent by the effort and can no longer raise its head quickly from the ground after striking and missing, the mongoose leaps in and fastens its teeth in its adversary's head. Then it crunches the life out of the snake.

It is a pretty fair and complete summary of what has been written so far, and accurate enough as an observation report till the very end. But the fight never ends as simply as that - the mongoose pouncing in and crunching up the snake's head in one bite. It leaps in and bites, and if it gets a fair hold, hangs on - if it does not, it releases the hold and leaps aside before the snake can do any harm and then waits for a better opportunity. When it has secured a firm grip on the snake's head, a violent, though frequently brief, struggle follows.

That may seem an academic nicety, whether the mongoose kills in one quick crunch or in a prolonged bite, till I explain my point. The mongoose invariably gets it hold on the snake's head, usually on the SNOUT. Thereafter the snake thrashes about and writhes violently in an attempt to break the enemy's grip. It is then the damage is done. A snake is only as good as its spine - as those who have killed a snake with a stick will know, a blow that breaks the back is far more effective in immobilising the reptile than one that crushes the head. A snake with a crushed head will no doubt die ultimately whereas such injury to the brain will kill a mammal instantly and outright in the lowly snake whose nervous system is less specialised and capitalized, the body continues to move rapidly after the head is dead, since the spinal nerves that control movement still function. "Eha" commenting on its peculiarity in his immutable manner says,
"There is nothing new under the sun - it is only the boasted principle of Self-Government"!

In the struggle that follows the mongoose's abiding bite, the cobra lashes out and coils and uncoils itself so violently that often the mongoose is tumbled right over. Nor is the attacker passive, merely hanging on grimly - it jerks and worries the snake, and I am not at all sure that its tumbles are not voluntary.

Whether this is so or not, the snake gets twisted and often it is on its back for considerable portions of its length - it is then that the mongoose is able to jerk it about, for a snake, whose "legs" are its ribs, has little purchase on the earth when turned over on its back. Within a minute or two the snake's struggle becomes weaker and less effective and controlled - its spine has been injured, or else numbed for movement, in course of its desperate struggles. Thereafter, with its adversary rendered helpless by spinal injury, the mongoose has little trouble in despatching it.

In the course of many years, I have seen only three mongoose-cobra fights, all three staged by snake-charmers for the entertainment of a crowd of spectators - two of those cobras were quite impressive (though, of course, they had been rendered impotent by removal of their poison glands) but none of the mongooses were full-grown. Once I had a good fortune to witness a KITTEN killing a middle-sized wild cobra _ its tactics were similar to those of a mongoose except that it made free use of its forefeet and claws to hold the snake's head down.

I remember the first mongoose-cobra encounter I saw more clearly than I should for purely adventitious reasons. I was school boy then, and the "battle" was staged in the yard of our school. The cobra was small and thin, and the mongoose was almost full-grown. It was all over in a few seconds. The snake's back was actually broken very early so that the bones formed a sharp protruding angle beneath the skin. I remember how, when I pointed this as the main cause of quick killing, my form-master held me up to ridicule, to the loud delight of my fellows, and was most sarcastic over my powers of observations. His view was that the snake was killed by a single bite.

The other two cobras were much larger and heavier and the battle was somewhat protracted. I noticed in these fights (and in the encounter between that kitten and wild cobra, too) a spinal injury (or shock) sustained by the snake in the course of its furious struggles and in in the worrying it was subjected to, preceded its death - the spinal injury (or shock) was apparent in the sudden lack of coordination of the snake's movements even more than in the slackening or their tempo.

One last point. In every instance the mongoose sank its teeth into the snake's upper jaw, getting a hold over the snout and leaving the lower jaw hanging loose. In a snake too, it is the lower jaw that is moved when it bites but the cobra was unable to snap with its loose-hanging lower jaw. I do not know the reason for this.

Of course, it is possible that a full-grown mongoose may deal masterfully with a cobra and kill it in one crunching bite. It is also quite possible that a really large cobra may get the better of a rash mongoose in a fight. The more I see of wild animals, the less certain do I feel of knowledge of animal behaviour gained by the study of captives. However, this uncertainty is most acute and valid in the study of intelligence and social behaviour of an animal and perhaps captive creatures love and fight very much as they do when wild."

-M. Krishnan


This was first published on 24 August 1958 in The Sunday Statesman

#One photograph has not been reproduced here.