It turns out that there was a perfectly good explanation for why the cat we came across this morning looked decidedly odd. It was not a cat at all. It was a mongoose! The dogs and I came across this thing at dawn this morning as we ambled along a camino. We often to head out early, the three of us, and manage to avoid any cyclists or people or cars and we can enjoy the campo, sometimes in the moonlight, before the world begins to stir.
The mongoose was maybe 30 metres away when I first saw it. It was just a dark silhouette against the pale track and it was reasonable to expect that it might be a cat. But even from that distance there was something wrong about it. For one thing it seemed bigger than a cat ought to be. We have two black labradors. One of them, Paris, is getting a bit long in the tooth and so has largely retired from chasing after cats or anything else. Not so Sable, who charged after the odd-looking cat and chased her along the path.
By this time I had suspected that it was a mongoose, quite a rare sighting here, and I wanted to have a closer look. Sable came back to me when I called her and, having secured her with a lead, we continued up the path to see if we could find the animal that had run away from us. We did. It had found another track off to the right and, when we arrived at the point the two paths meet, we saw it heading away from us in the distance. The overall profile and distinctive manner of its movement settled the matter for once and for all.
I must admit I had always assumed that the Egyptian mongoose, which is the species we have here in Spain, had been introduced by the Moors after they had arrived in the 8th century, but looking into it now things seem much less clear. It is not even entirely certain that they were introduced at all. Genetic and fossil evidence suggests that they might have naturally expanded from North Africa during past climatic events. If they were introduced however, it was a very long time ago and well before the arrival of the Moors. Maybe instead it was the Romans or Phoenicians over 2000 years ago. Studies on the ancient bones of mongoose have dated them to the fist century and it has been suggested that maybe the Romans introduced them to control rats and mice. However they got here, these enigmatic animals are part of the natural ecology, particularly in the southern part of Spain.
I remember, way back as a kid, being fascinated by the reports of mongoose attacking and eating venomous snakes and, while this is a stunt they may continue to pull off occasionally here in Spain, they seem to feed largely on small mammals and rabbits and large insects. They feed also on ground-nesting birds and game birds which, as you can imagine, makes them unpopular in certain quarters.
It seems odd to me that I should have come across mongoose so infrequently here and that the questions about their origins in Spain and Portugal remain open. Unusually for mammals, they are active during the day but they seek out heavy cover and generally keep a low profile. I suppose walking along a track in full view is not something that a mongoose is likely to do very often so I feel very fortunate that, however briefly, our paths should have happened to cross.
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