Day 223 - Mongooses and Centipedes

Image of a mongoose by Colin
the Scot, via Flickr.com

Barbados did not have any snakes. That was a good thing. The reason there were no snakes is that there were mongooses. The mongooses are not native to Barbados. They were introduced to tackle the rat and snake populations. They were very effective against snakes. There are none left. They weren't so effective against rats. They could be seen on the main streets downtown on any day.

But as seems always to happen, the imported species ended up doing some damage to the native animal population. For that reason, Barbados and other Caribbean islands banned the importation of mongooses some time after gaining independence. I learned about this during a visa interview when I asked a woman how old her daughter was. She answered, "She was born in the year they stopped the mongoose from Barbados."

Because there are few obvious changes in the seasons in the Caribbean, people seemed to have difficulty keeping track of the passage of time. Someone might describe a family as having just moved in when in fact they had been living there five years or more. Thus, events were good markers, even if they didn't easily translate into years for us tourists.

Sharifa was the only one of us who ended up encountering a mongoose. The mongoose's claws are not retractable, making them very effective weapons. We don't think Sharifa decided to attack the mongoose. We prefer to think she was trying to make friends. But the mongoose had other ideas and sent Sharifa back into the house where she raced behind our sofa to hide.

Our next door neighbor, Alan, was a veterinarian. His clinic was on the lower floor of their house. Sharifa was very fortunate for our proximity to Alan's clinic as we could get her to him before she went into shock.

Barbados did have a pest that we weren't so fortunate to avoid - centipedes. They were big and fast and

image of a centipede by Janielle Beh, via Flickr.com

persistent. They had migratory patterns that took them right through homes as former sugar cane fields were cut down and the land developed as new housing estates. Since we were the first residents of our house, the centipedes that found it in their way just came on in.

We asked neighbors who had been in the area longer if they had problems with centipedes, and they all said they had in the past. But they told us not to worry. Eventually they would stop coming. When we asked how long they would keep coming, they said about 3 to 5 years. We expected to be in Barbados 4 years, so that wasn't good news for us,

Sharifa was also the one who had the closest encounter with a centipede. We had invited a few friends for dinner one evening, including Alan, the vet from next door, and his wife, as well as a woman from the Canadian High Commission and a couple of colleagues from the U.S. embassy. I served paella which had large shrimp in it. So when Sheikha kept wandering around under the table meowing, I assumed she was begging for shrimp. Sharifa wasn't with her.

As the evening drew to a close and our visitors left, we headed upstairs and found a very large centipede on the wall of the living room. Alex grabbed a shoe and got rid of it, watching out carefully for the centipede's ability to raise up the front half of its body and flip backwards to inject its venom on a threatening hand. With the centipede dispatched, we headed up to bed and didn't think any more about it.

In the morning, when I went downstairs and announced, "Food," for the cats, only Sheikha came running. That was unusual, so I went looking for Sharifa. I found her sitting on a chair in the living room, not moving much. I noticed right away that her neck was swollen. She looked more like a rabbit with short ears than a cat.

image of tarantula by hankplank, via Flickr.com

We rushed her next door to Alan's clinic. He recognized right away that she had been bitten by a centipede. Sharifa stayed with Alan for a couple of days until he was sure the centipede venom had worked its way through her system.

Thankfully, there were no tarantulas on Barbados. But there were on St. Lucia where Alex worked for a year. . .