Saving a Musang

As usual I woke up today in the morning about 6 am and took a ride with my MTB mountain bike near the beach. Upon riding the 2nd round along the tarmac road, I heard the calls from the nearby houses and saw 2 pairs of shining eyes! I thought it was these 2 cat-like "Musang" with long tails that were harassing some birds early in the morning and caused all the noise.  I rode another round with my bicycle and the noise persisted and I decided to check on what was going on, thinking that perhaps the "Musang" might have grabbed hold of one of the young bird and the adults birds were giving all the desperate warning calls. On shining my headlamp on the fence of the house, I saw one of the young "Musang" crouching on the lower portion of the concrete wall, it was probably stunned by the light and stayed motionless while the mother Musang had fled the scene. I further probed the source of the noise where it came from, I found down under a deep drain of about 4-5 feet, there was another young "Musang" trying desperately to climb up. I suppose this particular kid "Musang" might have slipped itself into the drain and could not follow the team home!

I went back home and took my fishing net with a long handle and scooped that poor animal up the drain with some effort. When I scooped it half way through, the animal climbed up the handle and eventually set foot on the road. There it went and still frantically searching and calling for the mother Musang and its other sibling! Eventually the animal was set free and re-united with its family to roam freely in the wild again. I felt relieved to see them gone before humans might catch and keep them in captivity. I took the opportunity to take photos in the dark of the animal while it climbed up to the fence.

There are different types of Musang in Malaysia, they probably belong to the civet cat or fox families. They usually eat fruits or insects in the forest and make nearby secondary jungles of housing estates as their habitat. But some bigger size Musang are carnivorous and they eat even house chickens. I remember our village at one time, there was loss of chickens and we blamed that to the drug addicts who stole them for their drug money. But the most recent loss were some of my dwarf or Serama chickens went missing, and someone eventually set up a trap and caught the culprit, it was a big fierce Musang, double the size of a house cat!