Mongoose Release and Recapture

After the successful release of the Mongoose family we hadn’t seen them for a week or so and assumed they had made themselves at home in the bush. Little did we know that one of them was terrorising the residents on the conservancy. We were called out one day to pick up one of our mongoose nicknamed Stubby due to his small tail. When we arrived at the house we found Stubby on the veranda eating the dogs food, now came the task of having to catch him. This proved to be easier than we thought it would be and after about five minutes we manage to corner him and grab him at which point we popped him in a box and moved and released him on the other side of the conservancy where he was first released. 

After not hearing anything about Stubby for a few days we thought maybe we were in the clear, this was until we caught up with some of the anti-poaching guys. They informed us that Stubby had been raiding there tent and had now taken up resident in one of their beds. After our success the first time we though he would be easy to catch and that you would just be able to pick out of the bed. Well weren’t we wrong, after a good 30 minutes of trying to catch him with the use of a hoodie and a wash-up bucket it was time for a new plan. This plan involved an ambush as one of us waited patiently for him to approach while the other stood ready with the bucket to trap him. We finally managed to catch him at which point we realised there was no box to put him in, so we had to improvise, this consisted of a washing up tub with a hoodie wrapped round it to act like a lid. While this sort of worked it wasn’t the safest way to contain a mongoose as we soon found out as he tried to escape while we were in the car moving him back to the other side of the conservancy. While we haven’t been called out to pick Stubby up again he has been seen following the anti-poaching guys on their patrols of the conservancy, so he is still causing chaos and we are just waiting for the next call to put a halt to Stubbys’ rampage.