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“Kitna bada bichhoo hai... How
large is the scorpion and where was it last
seen?” I asked the groggy hostel guard at
Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Woh
doh foot ka bijju hai sir, aur uske teen
bacche bhi hain,” he responded.
A half-a-metre scorpion with three
young ones? Having lifted enough rocks
to fi nd scorpions beneath them, I was
nonplussed. I looked helplessly down at
the long forceps and small bag that I had
brought with me, and at my colleague,
a fellow rescuer with Wildlife SOS. “Did
you hear ‘bijju’ or ‘bichhoo’?” he asked.
Blaming a bad mobile connection, I said
I had heard bichhoo (scorpion). I didn’t
know at the time that bijju was the
colloquial name of an animal that would
continue to amaze me through the
course of my wildlife career.ABHI
K
SHEK
EKEK
NAR
AYA N
AN
THE CIVET IN
YOUR CUPBOARD
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
The creature locally known as bijju or
kabar bijju (grave digger) has many
names, but one etymology is particularly
interesting: ‘civet’, derived from the French
‘civette’, which goes back to the Arabic
‘zabād’, denoting the musky perfume
that is derived from the scent glands of
some civet species. The musk resembles
an ingredient in the fragrance ‘Obsession
for Men’ by Calvin Klein, civetone.
The common palm civet, Paradoxurus
hermaphroditus, in fact derives its
scientifi c name from the fact that both
sexes have perineal scent glands that
resemble testicles (hence ‘hermaphroditus’),
though the sexes are in fact distinct.
But returning to our protagonist, Bijju.
We entered one of the hostel roomsto fi nd a common palm civet and her
three kittens, the happy occupants of an
empty shelf in a cupboard. The human
occupants of the room were less happy
though and didn’t want a “wild animal”
with them, so as responsible rescuers
(if slightly ignorant back in 2009) we
‘rescued’ the civets and took them to our
shelter with the intention of releasing
them into a forest – where, as we then
believed, all wild things belonged.
Over the next few days, the mother
happily raised her young ones in a
small enclosure in the shelter, being
fed bananas and occasionally some
meat (since civets are omnivorous).
Eventually, once the kittens were
weaned, they were ready to be released- or as I thought then, ‘rehabilitated’.
We released them into a suitable forest
The civet family which the author helped 'rescue'
By Abhishek Narayanan in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.