My Husband & Other Animals

by Janaki Lenin

In Namibia, 11 marked leopards were moved 800 very long kilometres away. Six returned home over a period of 5 to 25 months. Let me put it this way – if these cats had been taken from Chennai and released north of Goa, they were able to walk right back. In the US, most of the 34 black bears that were moved about 200 kms from their home territories returned successfully. In India, an elephant translocated from the Terai to Buxa Tiger Reserve, a distance of about 250 kms, returned in less than two months. Salt water crocodiles in Australia were shown to home back after being moved 400 kms. Put me anywhere in Bangalore, and I’m lost immediately.

However, the distance record for homing is held by seabirds such as albatrosses and shearwaters. An albatross taken from an island in the Central Pacific, and released about 6,500 kms away in the Philippines returned in a month; two others returned from Washington State, US, 5,000 kms away.

It is not just the larger animals that possess this amazing skill. In the UK, bumblebees found their way home after being randomly dropped off 13 kms away from thei...

You need two things to find your way to a place – a map and a compass. The first shows your current location in relation to your destination, and the second tells you the direction you are moving. Biologists believe that animals have these instruments hard-wired in their brains and sensory organs.

So the jury is still out. Whether animals use sight, smell, sun, stars, the earth’s magnetic field, infrasound or a combination of these remains a magical mystery.

the list included satinwood, ebony, and bullet wood. These were huge timber trees that ought to have been 15 to 20 metres high but were no more than stunted bushes, the result of continuous hacking for fodder and firewood.

the dry evergreen forests were even more endangered than rainforests; only an estimated four to five per cent of the original forest remains.

Soon after the civil war ended in Sri Lanka, we visited Wilpattu National Park, which had been closed to visitors until then. Spread over 1,300 sq kms, the trees were familiar in name but unfamiliar in numbers and girth. Sloth bear scats at regular intervals on the main dirt road, cannon ball-sized elephant dung, a leopard, mugger crocodiles, and an array of creatures big and small, were the highlights of the memorable day.

greater racket-tailed drongo mimicking both sides of the catty argument.

From fighting tomcats, the bird moved on to the piercing call of a white-bellied sea eagle before going onto the sweet chirps of a tailor bird interspersed with a discordant truck horn. What was the point of this extraordinary mimicry?

Greater racket-tailed drongos hunt in feeding parties made of several species of birds. Sri Lankan ornithologists theorized that drongos may mimic different species to invite them to form such a group. But we don’t know for sure if this is coincidence or deliberate use of m...

While other birds are engrossed in foraging, drongos may act as sentinels, watching for predators. Should danger lurk, they sometimes mimic the alarm calls of various birds, presumably to incite a mob attack....

A while ago, we witnessed a black drongo making loud shikra calls, even as the latter was feeding on a golden oriole chick within earshot. The neat trick certainly didn’t drive the shikra away. Was it intentionally trying to incite a mob attack? It is also possible that if a drongo picks up a sound when...

Famously, some species like parrots and hill mynas have learnt to talk. This aptitude may be reinforced as their human trainers reward them when they say the right thing. But parrots can imitate a vacuum cleaner, a ringing telephone, and even a barking dog without the benefit of such treats. Einstein, a famous African grey parrot at the Knoxville zoo, imitates wolves, chimpanzees, roosters, tigers, and a range of ...

The most spectacular bird mimic, the lyrebird, is a hit on YouTube. It can imitate a car reversing, camera shutter, chain saw, the sound of falling trees, rifle shots, musical instruments, fire alarms, crying babies, trains, humans, just about anything it hears. Since male birds go to great lengths mimicking human sounds during the breeding season, ornithologists suggest that females may be selecting males with the most complex song. But European biologists found no evidence that male songbirds with better imitating skills have their way with the ladies. Another, somewhat nihilistic, theory suggests that mimicry may just be a learning error which serves no ultimate purpose.

Scientists reported that the drongos of the Kalahari make fake alarm calls to steal someone else’s lunch.

When the birds noticed a meerkat or babbler with a tidbit of food, they cried wolf. When the scared animal or bird ran for cover, dropping its prey in h...

Should any of your snake-catching buddies suffer a bite and survive, please don’t throng his bedside and go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. Instead, if you really care about him, tease him mercilessly. It will go a long way in prolonging his lifespan.

the large-spotted civet of Southeast Asia and the Malabar civet look almost identical.

Over millennia, civets were traded between Ethiopia, Southeast Asia and India for civetone, a secretion of the anal musk glands used in traditional medicine, perfumery, and as a religious offering. Even today, small Indian civets are maintained on farms in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, for the extraction of musk. Kozhikode, the centre of most recent Malabar civet records, was a well-known trading port from ancient times.

Nandini and Divya wondered if there was a possibility large-spotted civets brought from Southeast Asia escaped from captivity leading to occasional observation in the wild. This is not so far-fetched, as captive small Indian civets have escaped and established themselves in count...

Females of the little house geckos found in our homes can give birth without males. Others such as the butterfly lizard in Vietnam and the New Mexico whiptail lizard in the US have gone one step further and completely eliminated males from their populations. No males have ever been found.

The most widespread snake in the world is the miniscule Brahminy worm snake. It is the only all-female snake species, and researchers haven’t yet determined if it is a hybrid.

two-and-a-half-foot captive timber rattlesnake in Colorado called Marsha Joan producing a son, Napoleon, in 1995. She had never met a male in her 14-year lifetime. The following decade saw immaculate conception occur in a Burmese python called Maria in The Netherlands, and Aruba Island rattlesnakes in the US.

Appropriately, close to Christmas 2006, seven baby Komodo dragons were born to Flora at the Chester Zoo, UK. The seven-year-old

mother dragon had never met a male. Another Komodo, Sungai, at the London Zoo had been producing babies two years after her last contact with a male Komodo. On hearing of Flora’s miraculous progeny, genetic tests of Sungai’s offspring revealed that Sungai was also producing copies of herself without the aid of sex. Bab...

caramel-coloured Colombian boa constrictor at The Boa Store, a pet shop in Tennessee, US, had produced 22 babies parthenogenetically.

Two Ganges softshell turtles at the Croc Bank have been laying fertile eggs for the last 15 years without a male. Female turtles are known to store sperm in special receptacles for a few years.

In the Rocky Mountains, big-horned sheep are known to climb up precarious cliffs to scrape a particular kind of lichen that grows on rocks to get a buzz, while in Yemen, goats are addicted to khat leaves, just like their herders.

One of the numerous stories of Santa Claus’ origins leads to Siberia. During a mid-winter festival, a shaman enters the yurt through the central smoke-hole, carrying a bag of dried fly agaric mushrooms. Santa wears the colours of the toadstool and rides reindeer which appear to be flying. When people are zonked on these ‘shrooms’, their faces, especially cheeks and nose, turn ruddy. No prizes for guessing what Santa and Rudolph are high on while riding through the sky!

This is where Edward de Bono, who developed the concept of ‘lateral thinking’, takes off. He suggests that intoxicants can help you think creatively by taking you out of your set pattern of thinking. If that were true, surely the world will see a spate of new ideas, inventions, and endeavours as an offshoot of the mind-altering experiences of New Year’s Eve.

Makara means sea monster in Sanskrit and is the origin of the word ‘mugger’, both in Hindi and English. In Hindu iconography, makara is also represented as the vahana (vehicle) of Ma Ganga, the river goddess.

The master sculptor, V. Ganapati Sthapati, describes makara as a mythical animal with the body of a fish, trunk of an elephant, feet of a lion, eyes of a monkey, ears of a pig, and the tail of a peacock.

The fabulous beast isn’t just an adornment; it apparently symbolizes chaos out of which order and creation arise. The height of order is depicted by the fearsome kirtimukha, and then creation descends once more into chaos. The deity sitting in front of the archway presides over the eternal cycle of creation and destruction.

Today, the last 200 breeding gharial try to bask and nest on river banks gouged by rampant sand mining and farming. The Yamuna and Ganga may be holy rivers, but they are also among the most polluted in the world. More than 100 gharial died in the winter of 2007-08 from toxin-caused kidney failure in the Chambal, a Yamuna tributary, caused by a suspected pollutant.

In the story, kirtimukha may be a parable of life. In reality, wouldn’t you say that it holds a mirror to the grotesque face of our rapaciousness?

In my teens I became besotted with Gerald Durrell. I read and re-read his books, savoured his wit and concern for animals large and small, and my world-view was solidly cemented.

Almost overnight I switched strategy to positive reinforcement – reward good behaviour and ignore the bad. If a not-yet-house-trained puppy does his job in the garden, he gets cuddled and praised. But if he has an accident inside the house, I just clean up. No anger, no shouting, no whacking. To my astonishment, the dogs learnt very quickly.

I’ll let you in on a little insight – it works even on grown men! As in most Western potty households, Rom and I had our share of endless toilet-seat arguments. It was a no-win situation, until one day, after I learnt positive reinforcement, I found the seat down and a light bulb went on in my head. I gave Rom a loving squeeze and lo, thenceforth the seat was flipped down oftener than it was up. Besides, it is so much more fun to cuddle than argue.

In my experience, the one with the worst reputation is called devil nettle, fever nettle or elephant nettle, and its scientific name is Dendrocnide sinuata (meaning ‘tree nettle’ with ‘wavy leaf margin’ in Greek). It is found in the forests of the Western Ghats, the Northeast and onwards into Southeast Asia.

asked Ramchandrappa, a botanical authority who works for the Forest Department in Agumbe, about this plant. He called it ‘Malai Murugan’ in Kannada and said the antidote is lime juice or turmeric powder smeared on the affected areas. Apparently the symptoms subside immediately. Turmeric powder will be a definite addition to my jungle apothecary.

Snakes of India: The Field Guide by Rom and Ashok Captain,

Strangely, my table was in the venomous reptiles section where adjacent tables were piled high with Gila monsters, black Pakistani cobras, albino rattlers, mambas, tarantulas and scorpions, all alive and dangerous.

There were womas from Australia, brilliant colour morphs of geckos, and crazily patterned ball pythons from Africa, orange garter snakes, bearded dragons, various tortoises – more reptiles than I had seen in any zoo anywhere in the world.

The quiet-natured and beautiful ball pythons had taken over; no other species was sold in as many numbers.

Every October, for about two and a half decades, flocks of egrets arrived at the Crocodile Bank and roosted in the trees overhanging the crocodile ponds.

The raucous noise of parental squabbling and chicks’ incessant pleas to be fed were deafening. To add to our woes, cormorants, night herons, and pond herons also joined the nesting orgy.

The most sensible thing anyone, who doesn’t know snakes, can do is simply admire them and leave them alone.

Brought up in a city, I was so far removed from life in the raw that I sought to find justice, cause and resolution to death. In reality it is ‘quick, bright, forgettable’, Russell writes. Death occurs because there was once life; something has to die to feed the living. The eternal dance of life and death drives not just plants and animals but even stars.

A part of the problem is that snakebite is not a ‘notifiable disease’, that is, the Central Government’s Health Ministry has not issued a data collection directive to the states as is the case with AIDS. The other problem is, of course, the obdurate belief in country medicine and quacks rather than antivenom serum.