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3 How the Honey-Guide Delivered a Man into the Coils of a Python

The question whether the honey-guide leads its human follower to snakes and beasts of prey can be authoritatively answered in the affirmative. It does not happen often, but it certainly does happen.

It is perhaps not generally known that the South African honey-bird, or honey-guide, is of special interest to comparative psychologists. In fact, outside the order of primates, there is no more interesting animal in existence, and for this reason: in the whole organic world there is no known instance where so

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complex an instinct has been acquired and become hereditary in a species - certainly no instinct that is exercised in co-partnership with man, the archenemy of all living things. It is impossible to over-estimate the apparent ‘cleverness’ of the honey-guide and its persistence, although many European naturalists still believe that the stories about it (like the stories of our spitting cobras) are popular exaggerations. No idea can be more erroneous. Every naturalist who makes acquaintance with the honey-guide for the first time is inclined to exclaim: ‘The half has not been told me.’

The honey-guide is also of great interest to naturalists because of the battle that has been waged among systematists through the centuries as to its correct classification. The early South African naturalist Spaarman, who introduced it to science, made it a cuckoo (Cuculus indicator). Layard, another early South African naturalist, raised it to the dignity of a separate order - Indicator indicator. The former, by the by, mentions that the bird not infrequently guides a human being to a leopard or a snake. These early naturalists both averred that its wonderful instinct was originally exercised in conjunction with the ratel or honey-badger (Mellivora capensis). Man was a substitute partner.

The honey-guide, like the cuckoo, is a parasite. It never makes its own nest and never rears its own young.

I know of several instances where the honey-guide led its human followers to snakes - one instance in my own personal experience nearly ended with fatal results to the human partner. Before I relate these instances, it is perhaps just as well to say something of the pythons of Waterberg. At one time, in the central portion of the district, pythons of enormous size were found. They were certainly the largest snakes I have ever had an opportunity of measuring. Many years ago Mr Jean Daly (brother to Dr Daly, of Johannesburg) shot a ‘wopper’. It was remarkable because it had swallowed a full-grown duiker ram, horns and all. (It is commonly said the python swallows horned antelopes by starting at the hindquarters and allowing the head and horns to protrude from the jaws until the neck is severed by the natural process of decay.) Mr Niemand and I once shot a seventeen-and-a-half foot long specimen on the farm Buffelskloof, near Naboomspruit. It had just swallowed two dogs both considerably larger and heavier than the average Airedale. Mr Cornelis Lambrecht, of Naboomspruit, was led to one by a honey-bird and eventually shot it in a pool of water. It was eighteen-and-a-half feet long. But the record went to the gun of Mr McClure, an English farmer who still lives near Naboomspruit. His specimen measured between nineteen and twenty feet. These were the largest snakes I had ever seen, and I have spent most of my life among the wild animals of Africa.

The honey-guide incident I wish to relate, as of especial interest and falling within my personal experience, is connected with one of these giant pythons of

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Waterberg. One morning three blacks set out from the farm Rietfontein 1638 (now in the middle of the platinum fields) ‘to look for honey-birds’. Two of them were grown men; the third, the son of a petty headman, was a boy of sixteen. This lad (known by the Sesuto nickname Mafura), happened to be very fat - as befits the son of a headman! The two men both had axes; the boy was unarmed. They climbed the side of a hill through fairly thick thorn scrub. The two men were about a hundred yards apart; the boy out of sight, separated from them by a considerable distance. Suddenly they heard him call out: ‘There is a honey-bird here and the hive is near.’ They shouted back to let them know when he found the hive. A few minutes later, a howling yell came from the boy, succeeded by insistent cries for help. The two men ran as fast as they could in his direction and found him in the coils of a big python. The snake had three coils round the boy and had pinned his right arm to his side within the coils. His left arm was free and the boy had seized the reptile by the throat with his free hand. As the two men came on the scene the snake released the lower coil and seized a sapling with the end of its tail. By this time the boy was speechless and rapidly growing limp; his grip on the throat relaxed and the next moment the snake had poured a mass of lubricating saliva over his head and shoulders. The elder of the two men, who was a Christian and ‘educated’, and reputed to be very wise and clever, showed what he was made of in this sudden emergency. He peremptorily stopped the younger man, who was about to attack the snake with his axe, and informed him that he had heard the old men and witch doctors say there was only one way of saving a man's life under such circumstances: a sharp peg must be cut from dry wood, and it must be the wood of a special tree, and this peg must then be driven through the tail of the snake into the ground. The unfortunate boy was to all appearances in articulo mortis while these two asses solemnly went through the magic formula. Then only did they cut the snake to pieces and release the boy.

He was brought to me the same evening for medical treatment. It was evident he had had a terrific squeeze. There were no ribs broken, but there was considerable internal haemorrhaging. He recovered after a couple of days.

He said the honey-guide leading him had started ‘dipping’ over a patch of grass, indicating the presence - as he thought - of the hive. As he hurried up, he stumbled over the snake.