It’s over. I survived Christmas in retail. Now I just have to come back down to earth and gird my loins for the “year of profound change” that our enthusiastic new management is promising. And wait for the children to go back to school. Soon. Please.
People say that children are like wild animals. This is not fair. Children are much worse than wild animals. Wild animals have to spend at least some of the day looking for food. My children get food by tearfully walking around behind us demanding peanut butter toast. Between the meals they refuse to eat. And they are quiet. Wild animals, I mean. Not children. Children are not quiet. Not my children. Ever.
My three-year old daughter is going through that magical stage where she feels the need to narrate every second of her life. As a teacher. This would be cute were my wife and I not assigned roles as her pupils, and constantly sent to “the naughty carpet”.
My son is eight. He doesn’t narrate his life any more. When he’s not telling my wife to come and look at everything he does (including watching television), he provides a soundtrack. To everything. At the moment, it’s the theme tune to the Lord of the Rings. When he gets bored of that, he just makes explosion noises. After that, he descends into inarticulate, wurbling, gibbering noises. He’s not autistic or anything. As far as we can tell, the world’s most exciting action movie is constantly playing out in his head.
Luckily for me, most of this noise is focused on my wife. She’s sitting next to me now, staring off into the middle distance and muttering to herself while her right eye twitches in time to the song in my son’s head. It’s all quite entertaining, but not the right sort of environment for being creative. So I can’t do anything fun on this blog quite yet. I’m just going to take the cowards way out and blog about animals again. Proper weasels. Mustelids.
Yup. I’m afraid it’s the year’s last lowveld ecosystem post. Or the years first, depending on how long it takes me.
As I said, mustelids are proper weasels, and their kin. We.ve only got one weasel. And one stoat (or pretty damn close to one). And one otter. Oh, and the god-emperor of all the beasts that walk the earth.
The weasel that wasn’t .
As I said, the lowveld has only one proper weasel. All of Africa only has one weasel (There are a couple of others up north, but they are invaders from Europe).The striped weasel. And it doesn’t even want to be a weasel. It wants to be a skunk. It looks just like a weasel; small, sinuous body with a spine made of rubber, short little legs, head close to the ground, flows rather than walks. It’s designed to live on rats and mice, and eats almost nothing else.
Africa’s only weasel about to demonstrate the local equivalent of the “Axe Effect”.
It’s designed to chase those rats and mice down their holes. And it’s very, very good at it. Amazingly, if its head fits down a hole, it is supple enough to change direction, somehow turning a hundred and eighty degrees without snapping its spine. And it can dig like a little demon. Just like any other weasel.
Unlike any other weasel, it’s black and white. These colours are useful if you want everything to see you at night (it only comes out at night). Its body is black, with stark white stripes running off its head and down its back, just like a skunk. Because it stinks. Just like a skunk. It defends itself by spraying anyone who messes with it with a sweetly sickening spray. All weasels have powerful scent glands they use to mark their territory and advertise their sexual status. The striped weasel has given up on these trivial pursuits and uses its scent glands to make everyone leave it alone. It’s not our champion stinker though. It has a bigger cousin.
Pepe Le Pew’s got nothing on me!
This is a zorilla. And it’s not impressed by your skunks.
Come back to my place, Mon Cheri. We will dance by the light of the moon and make sweet, sweet love. Just promise not to inhale!
I don’t know who gets to decide these things, but those in the know say it smells worse than a skunk. It needs to. It’s small, and can’t run very fast, and it finds its prey out in the open, on well grazed plains. In Africa. With lions, leopards, cheetahs, spotted hyenas, brown hyenas, caracals, pythons, giant eagle owls and more. Like the weasel, it eats rats and mice. Unlike the weasel, it eats other things too, like insects.
It’s a stoat, or pretty close to one, but its behaviour is all skunk. Cross one, and it will bristle up, raise its tail at you and scream. Fail to get the message, and it will spray you with an unholy stench.
A zorilla with the safety catch off.
And it doesn’t just stink, it burns, too. If that doesn’t work, it will play dead. Badly. It will roll onto its back and lie dead still, unless you move behind it. Then it flips over and plays dead again, facing the right way. Not very convincing. But maybe if you smell like an open sewer and your eyes are burning, it’s enough.
The blind otter.
Africa is a very old place. Everything is rounded and smooth. Even the mountains. When I look at pictures of the wild places of Europe and North America, everything looks sharp and crisp and clean. Because of glaciers. A couple of thousand years ago, most of the northern hemisphere was stripped clean and scoured into sharp edges by great sheets of ice.
It gives you clean water. I’ve never been to America, but in Europe, I was struck by how clear the water was. Even substantial rivers were as clear as crystal. Not here. Millennia of slow erosion have ground the continent down into fine dust. And it all gets carried away in the water. Down in the lowveld, even the tiniest of streams is muddier and thicker than the Mississippi.
Which is a problem for otters. And there are otters here. But here they don’t dive down into crystal pools and shimmer after glittering trout and salmon, twisting and turning with streams of bubbles following them like balls of moving glass. Here the otters grope their way through the muddy shallows like blind people in unfamiliar houses, hoping to find something slow enough to grab hold of. And they’re built for it. They’re called cape clawless otters, because they’ve got tiny little people hands.
Africa’s graceful water-dancer, with its silly nose and creepy man-hands.
Claws are very useful for catching fleeing trout. But they’ve got no nerves in them, so they’re not very good for feeling under rocks and sunken logs. For than you need wide fingers and short nails. Which is what the cape clawless otter has. They live mostly on freshwater crabs. Amazingly, they do catch the odd fish. Because the fish can’t see anything either.
Why? Why, why, why?
The whole blind groping thing may make them seem somehow feckless. But they aren’t. They swim better than fish, and happily share their world with Nile crocodiles, because they make crocodiles look slow.
And they’re tough. Stupidly tough. Throw an American pit-bull and an otter into a ring, and the otter will walk out, unharmed and trying to pick bits of pit-bull out of its teeth with its stubby little fingers. Because it’s a mustelid. Pound for pound, mustelids are stronger than anything else. They are sinuous strips of pure muscle stuck onto rubber skeletons, and it’s best to leave them alone. Especially their cousin. The ratel.
God-emperor of the beasts.
This is Big-Boy. He’s a lion. Which means he weighs about 200kg and stands four foot high at the shoulder.
This is Stoffel. He’s a honey badger. A ratel. Which means he weighs about 15kg and stands nowhere near a foot high.
Big-Boy and Stoffel are problem animals who are looked after at a place called Moholoholo. It’s an animal rehabilitation centre outside Hoedspruit, a tiny town at the edge of the civilised world. Both were raised as pets. Big-boy was brought in because keeping 200kg alpha predators in your home is bloody stupid.
Stoffel was a better pet. Until he ate his owners brand new Mercedes. Or at least the interior. There wasn’t a piece of upholstery bigger than a ratel’s mouth, and all the wiring had been bitten into two centimetre lengths. So Stoffel was sent to jail. But he’s a honey badger. No prison has been built that could hold him.
First, he dug under the concrete walls of his pen. So they dug the foundations a metre deep. They thought he might be bored, so they built him a rockery. He piled the rocks up next to the wall and escaped again. They thought he might be lonely, so they got him a girlfriend. This time he pushed his girlfriend up against the wall, and climbed up her and over the wall. Here’s a clip of him using a log to break out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC0OJj3-YOI&list=UUGbl_HYfXxRnV3aVdGG72Fw
He wasn’t trying to get away. He likes people. Or maybe he’s hoping they’ll give him another Mercedes. He just doesn’t think he belongs in a concrete pen. Sometimes, though, he fights boredom his own way. The first time he escaped, he then climbed into Big-Boy’s enclosure. And, in scientific terms, kicked his ass. The 15kg overgrown weasel found a way to break into a 200kg lion’s cage in order to show it its place in the natural order of things. The lion needed medical attention for a month.
He did it again a few months later. Sadly, this time he came second. Don’t worry though, he’s fine. Because a honey badger is one of the few animals that can lose a fight with a lion and walk away.
It’s his special survival trick. Some creatures run fast. Some are camouflaged. Some stink. Some have sharp spines. The honey badger is fearless and very, very unpleasant to deal with. There is only one other creature I know of that does this, and not uncoincidentally, it’s a mustelid too. The wolverine. They don’t have any lions to play with, so they play with bears.
A young male lion, about to learn why the funny little black and white thing is not running away.
A young female lion, about to learn the value of running away herself.
All mustelids are almost supernaturally strong. Ferrets hunt rabbits many times their own size. But the honey badgers (and wolverines) have taken it to the next level. The lithe weasel body has thickened out and been packed with lean, hard muscle, like an MMA fighter on the world’s best steroids. The head is thick and broad, like a pit-bull, giving the badger jaw muscles that can chew through a gin trap.
But its greatest asset is its skin. First of all it’s loose. Grab a badger as tightly as you like, anywhere you like, and he will still nail you. Because he can turn around in his skin. And that’s not all. It’s bullet proof, too. If you want to shoot one, bring a high calibre rifle. The skin will also stop a machete blade. If you really want to kill one, your best bet is to club it on the head. Since the badger is likely to be trying to kill you back at the time, this isn’t necessarily a good bet.
It’s black and white. A warning colour. And a well-deserved one. A honey badger isn’t invulnerable. For a start, lions in the wild don’t live alone in enclosures. They live in prides. 15kg superweasels simply cannot prevail against several 200kg supercats. But they will certainly give it a try. And the lions will pay a price. In blood. And the next time those particular lions see a badger, they will walk the other way. So good is the badger at being best left alone that baby cheetahs have evolved to look like them.
Growl. We’re badgers. seriously. You might want to take a step or two back.
It’s not just predators you would expect a badger to be more scared of. It’s their food, too. Let’s start with bees. African killer bees. They aren’t called honey badgers for nothing. Getting to honey means getting through several thousand very angry creatures equipped with poison darts that can kill a horse. The thick skin helps. And the badger has another trick up his sleeve. Maybe. He has a stinky spray too, just like a skunk. And according to some experts he uses this to subdue the bees he is robbing, just like beekeepers do with smoke. He certainly doesn’t use it for self-defence, like a skunk. For that he uses unadulterated rage. But he gets stung anyway. A lot. Unsurprisingly, he’s immune to the poison.
He’s almost immune to snakebites, too. If you search around the internet, you will find a clip of a badger attacking a puff adder. Killer of more people than any other snake in the world. It looks like a rather sad draw. The puff adder bites the badger a good few times before getting its head crushed by those powerful jaws. And then the badger rolls over dead too. Or so it seems. But then, a few hours later, he rolls over again. He looks around a little groggily, eats the snake and trots off into the bush with so little drama that you get the idea that that’s how he does it every time. Attack snake. Get bitten. Bite snake. Slip into toxic coma. Wake up. Eat snake. Sorted.
If I seem effusive about honey badgers, it’s because they are my favourite animal. Not because I’m like them, but because they are one of the first animals I remember from all my years spent down in the bush. Honey badgers are pretty rare. We only see one or two a year. But when we first started going down to the bush, there was a bit of a plague of them, because people had been feeding them, throwing the bones from their braais (barbecues) into the bush to bring in hyenas and other scavengers.
Being fearless, the badgers wouldn’t wait for the people to go to bed before coming in to eat the bones. They would happily trot out onto the stoep (patio) to bustle around people’s feet, picking up scraps. Being morons, the people weren’t too phased either. They would stay out there with them, occasionally lifting their legs to let the badgers pass underneath.
Not me though. I was a reader. And I read about badgers. Specifically, I read about badgers killing larger creatures by (I kid you not) biting their balls off. After I told my father about this, for some reason we stayed inside whenever they came visiting. We watched them through the window though. And realised that we had made the right choice.
We saw one climb a tree once. With none of the grace of a cat. It simply savaged the tree until the tree let it win. When we went out to have a look in the safety of daylight, we saw claw-marks nearly half an inch deep in the bark. And we watched one win a fight with a hot metal grid. We had been cooking on it, and leaned it up against a wall just before going to bed. It had only just stopped glowing red when a badger came up and licked it. And burned itself. And proceeded to exact a terrible and noisy revenge on it.
So that’s it for 2012. Half a year of blogging done. The next time you come here (and I hope you will), it will all, I hope, look rather different. I’ve got some time off, and I’m going to do some spring cleaning. Hope you like it. Happy New Year.
23thorns 
As soon as I saw this I remembered this post and just HAD to share. 🙂
http://www.snorgtees.com/t-shirts/honeybadger-don-t-care
Have you seen the honeybadger don’t care clip on YouTube?
No. Do you have the link?
I am starting to get why Africans and Aussies are so very similar…we both come from ancient places where the sun has burned us drier than hades and our animals can’t quite work out what they want to be at any given time. I think my pitbull Earl is related to Stoffel…he eats sofas…does that count? Good lord your animals are macho! Our Aussie animals are oftwhile confused about the bits that make them up and most of them are poisonous but we don’t have weasels with extreme attitude like you do…how on EARTH haven’t the Honey badgers taken over the world? Or are they like reprobated youth…too bored and affected to do so? I have nothing but healthy respect for your honey badgers and I have just one request to make…”Dear African peoples…please please PLEASE don’t send your Honey Badgers over here like you have sent most of your flora in the past we Aussies are not naturally adapted to deal with them and may die out as a species”…(or is this an insidious plot for an Africaans takeover bid for Aussie soil!”
Really funny. I appreciated greatly the description of your children. I’m sure a lot of your readers relate. I laughed out loud when you described the ferocious badger. Now, whenever I travel, I will first ask the local experts if there are badgers about, before I go there, preferably.
They’re not so bad. Their whole survival trick is to make everything leave them alone. Do so, and they return the favour.
Great post! I too am partial to mustelids. (I think they have quite a following; a successful biologist I know, known primarily for work on venomous snakes, told me once that he secretly always also wanted to study mustelids. Venomous snakes, mustelids… yeah, I see the similarity.) I read somewhere once that one of the little ones – the least weasel or some relative – takes on the largest prey, relative to its own body mass, of any predator.
Don’t tell him about the mongooses. He’ll have a career crisis!
On the black-and-white question, I think this animal may have good camouflage the same way that the zebra does http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/question454.htm
I think the zebra thing works because they are big and live in large herds. These guys are mostly solitary and nocturnal. If you hear honey badgers moving around at night, they aren’t trying to hide from anyone. They sound like small Sherman tanks with emphyzema. The black and white is apparently a warning- it’s easy to see in the dark.
As my mother used to say: you can tell the difference between a weasel and a stoat. A weasel is weasily recognised and a stoat is stoatally different.
And we ermine ah about the rest! Sorry. Puns aren’t my strong point.
Says who? I like that new line on the old weasel joke.
Amazing creatures!! I have never heard of the zorilla!!! What a strange critter…looks like a weasel & skunk combined….Africa is a magical country!!! Thank you for sharing with us…I learn something new everytime i read a post from you!!!
I giggled about your comparison of children & wild animals!!!
We have a saying here: “Discover wildlife; have children!”
Sound familiar??
Sherri-Ellen/
Thanks for another great read!
Hi! I’ve nominated your blog for the Sunshine Award, which is an award for bloggers who positively and creatively inspire other bloggers. Here’s my post on the award:
http://siciliangodmother.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/ive-won-a-sunshine-award/
There’s such a lot of fantastic wildlife where you are – almost too much to take it all in. I like the look of the zorilla but think I’ll be happy enough not to meet one!
I’ve never seen one myself. I would love to. From a distance.
And possibly with a peg on your nose! 🙂
Indeed. Although there is a small, quiet part of me that really wats to know what it’s like. Could it really be that bad? And at least then you would really know who your friends were!
Love your blog! How far have you got with your book on thorns? I must be honest, I can’t imagine what you’d write, but having read the above blog with fascination and amusement, I’m sure you will make it riveting.
On the subject of kids I have an almost 17 year old, and he’s just starting to show signs of becoming human, so hang in there – it’s a long road – though in between those signs of humanity his body is definitely inhabited by an angst riddled dictator, albeit one I’m quite fond of. Looking forward with enthusiasm to the metamorphasis into fully fledged human being.
Nice to see a fellow South African, even if I am insanely jealous of your life. Good luck with the book!
Interesting information here and I can totally relate to losing sanity while the kids are home while on school holidays! Thank you for stopping by Travel Oops and liking the “Unfortunate Photo” post! Steph
Ah wait a minute, I saw a video from a game camera that captured what sure appeared to be a wolverine in Michigan…they’re pretty sneaky and man can they cover ground. It’s cool to know that super – strength, speed over snow (wolverine), cleverness, jaws of steel and sheer audacity exist. Here in Wisconsin I haven’t ever seen a regular badger in the wild, yes weasels, minks, skunks, and I think a martin, maybe-it was running. I had heard of the honey badger but hadn’t made the connections. And as others have already said, love to read what you write.
thank you. Regular badgers and honey badgers aren’t the same thing at all. Honey badgers are much closer related to martens.
Oh sorry, I wasn’t clear, I meant the connection between wolverines and honey badgers. The regular badger is the Wisconsin state mascot and since that’s where I am it seems like I should have seen at least one in the wild.
I always laugh when I come to your site and read. I only ever mean to stop in for a minute, and end up reading, and reading…. Great stuff; I console myself that it’s “educational” too, not just “recreational” surfing!
Thank you. I can think of no higher compliment than to be the thief of someone else’s time!
My favorite college football team is the Wolverines of Michigan. An odd nickname as there hasn’t been a wolverine in the state for a long time. Probably a good thing since they are as irritable as you describe for the honey badger. Good to know there’s a few creatures out there that just don’t give a damn!
The Michigan Woodchucks doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Good point.
Fascinating stuff, but I have to admit my favorite part of this post was about parenting. So true about wild animals having to hunt for food, but not kids. And the twitching eye? Oh yeah, all the time. We are a blended family with four kids — two girls (11, 18) and two boys (13 and 13), one of whom is autistic (That part about your son not being autistic made me laugh!) My wife and I have actually sat on the couch at the end of the day, watching each other’s twitching eyes come into occasional sync — like when the windshield wiper blades match with the beat on the radio. Nicely done 🙂
Thank you. It’s nice to get a shout from someone who does this for a living. If you’re into the whole parenting thing, give “parenting for dummies” a try (sorry, I tried to insert a link, but apparently I’m not so smart.) But be warned, just reading it can get you into trouble with family services!
You’re welcome, and thanks for the suggestion! No worries about the link; unless it’s a sausage, I won’t know what to do with either 🙂
Killer bees, weasels that smell worse than skunks, Houdini-like badgers…yikes. Suddenly, I find myself thankful that I am up-to-my-eyeballs in snow in Canada with our mundane moose and beavers. Love your blog, by the way!
Moose and beavers may be mundane, but your climate is not. Stepping out into minus thirty odd degrees centigrade scares me more than wrestling honey badgers. Naked.
Gee. You just made me feel like a cross between Wonder Woman and Grizzly Adams. I can honestly say that is a first for me.
Concerning your 8-year-old son, you still have many years ahead of you of soundtracks. Well, maybe not soundtracks, but scene-by-scene replay of favorite TV shows and super hero movies. My 12-year-old son loves to tell me all about Dr. Who. And super heroes. But I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way…
Thanks for stopping by my site!
I would. Our son could tell us something about his own life once in a while. He once did a dress rehearsal for a school concert, in which he sang a solo, in front of 300 older kids from another school. When we asked him what had happened that day, the answer was “nothing”. We only heard about it from his teacher a week later.
We are, however, completely up to speed on Spongebob Squarepant’s day.
Haha. That’s so true. Same thing happens in my home. Must be a boy thing. 🙂
Happy New Year and I hope you will keep on writing for a very long time 😉
So do I. Mostly because it involves not dying. Which I’m quite keen on!
Second that! 🙂
I have been screamed at by weasels and feel much better now that I found a place to say it and not sound daft.
It doesn’t sound daft at all. It sounds like the title of an autobiography. “Screamed at by Weasels; the Quill Gordon Story”.
Ha ha loved it…..very entertaining!
Reblogged this on Confession Concession.
I love reading about all the different animals. It’s discovery channel but with sarcasm.
As always, I read with great pleasure about things I could care less about AND enjoyed it thoroughly!
I almost didn’t read this post, as I didn’t think I was terribly interested. Fortunately, I did read this post and came away with new knowledge of the creatures of Africa’s lowveld, and a great respect for mustelids! Wonderful post!
I’m glad you did.
Me too. I’ll be back.
I adore honey badgers, as I love wolverines and other weasel family critters…including my own domestic ferret pets. So I always enjoy reading your blog. Happy New Year.
don’t tell your ferrets about the badgers. They’ll get ideas above their station.
Oh, trust me, they already have ideas above their stations! One ancient solitary, Helen, considers ME her cagemate….in need of grooming, correction oh, and yes, responsible for her warm breakfast and late night snack!
I’m glad of 2 things. 1. No honey badgers in Australia and 2. I don’t have balls to be bitten off should I ever visit Africa and run afoul of a honey badger. They sound like impressive animals I must say.
they are genuinely awe-inspiring. Thank god they’re not Australian, ’cause then they would be poisonous, too.
I’ve never been convinced by the whole ball-biting story. There are supposed eyewitness accounts of them killing things like wildebeests like this, but I just can’t imagine why they would want to.
Good luck for your first full year in your new home.
He he he, ain’t THAT the truth! Just imagine them with poisoned barbs or venom injecting teeth or that toxic smelly juice being a neurotoxin that killed in the space of 20 minutes! They would be viciously hunted to extinction by men all wearing cricket boxes!
In thinking about it, it would be a rather efficient means of catch and kill though. Take away a wildebeests pride and joy…
Your kids and mine sound like they are the same species for sure too. My eldest is still in the “why” stage (he’s 4) and my darling daughter is a “why” immitator with a broken in the on position whine button. My youngest is the most placid and quietest… As long as you don’t foil his plans. He is the screaming equivalent of your honey badger! Huge, EXTREMELY vocal and too cute not to spoil outrageously.
Thanks for your wishes too. We are very much looking forward to our first year here and excited to see what it brings. Just a bit anxious about our local wildlife (so far kookaburras which ate the skinks and mice, tonnes of butterflies and a rabbit that is on borrowed time as far as I’m concerned. The threat of snakes scares the living crap out of me though – tiger and browns and copperheads being locals here if you’re keen to research non-African scary animals). Friday will be 39 degrees so if we’re going to see them…
After that description, I’m not entirely sure I like your honey badgers but I certainly have a healthy respect for them. Interesting stuff.
they’re actually not that bad. They have nothing to gain from attacking you, so if you leave them alone, they’re just fine. It’s when other creatures interfere with them that things get a little hairy.
Fascinating stuff!
Fascinating stuff. I first learned about Honey Badgers in the second of “Gods must be crazy film”. An amazing animal.
I love your blog! We have badgers here in Wiltshire but they are not honey badgers, one old boy has trodden a path through the grass on my back lawn, he plods his nocturnal way to who knows where, and you could break your ankle falling down their huge setts up on the hill. At one time, we had weasels too. Their bellies were the most beautiful caramel toffee colour. I don’t know where they went. They lived under the shed. Maybe the dog scared them off. Or maybe they extincted themselves. Once in Scotland, we made friends with a pine marten. He was shy and beautiful and addicted to bread and jam. Which probably wasn’t good for him.
‘Round here, animals tend to move fairly often, because their dens fill up with ticks and fleas. Maybe your weasels just moved on. Or maybe they heard that a neighbour was handing out bread and jam.
Hee hee, I like the idea of them heading off for jam butties!