Chigüire

This post is mostly fact — the description of the Chigüire and the Tragavenado — and some imagination — the scene of the snake trapping the rodent. With a true bit of Alexander von Humboldt thrown in for good measure.

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Chigüires (known as Capybaras in the US) are rarely seen alone. Their two principal enemies are the crocodile and the jaguar, followed closely by a third: the tragavenado (“deer swallower”), Venezuela’s version of a python or a boa constrictor. Despite these enemies, they reproduce with amazing rapidity.

The Chigüire thrives abundantly in Venezuela, living fifty or sixty together in troops on the banks of rivers, of which the principal is the grand Orinoco. They also congregate along the Apure and Caroní, other major rivers which happen to be tributaries of the Orinoco. These animals grow to about the size of pigs in Midwestern farms and even look a bit like them, but with yellowish-brown bristly fur.

They swim better than they run, often gracelessly diving precipitately when feeling the least alarm, squealing sharply and loudly. Their eyes are large and protruding, a characteristic of nocturnal animals. They defend themselves only at the last extremity, by then usually too late, although, according to some naturalists, their grinding teeth, especially the rear ones, can tear the paw of a jaguar or even the leg of a horse.

In the colonial era, inland, Chigüires were considered appropriate food, including hams in time of lent. In this, the monks and the Indians were agreed. It is not clear what the monks’ reaction was when Chigüires were determined to be not swine, but the world’s largest rodents — serious, persistent biological study of these mammals did not occur until the twentieth century.

Humboldt, the great 19th and early 19th Century explorer and naturalist, tells of having captured two by simply outrunning them. When Chigüires run, their gait seems like a slight gallop (their hind legs being longer than their fore legs) and not very swift. When he brought them to his host out in the great llanos of Venezuela, expecting to have them slaughtered and roasted that night, the proprietor assured him that such “Indian game” was not food fit for “us white gentlemen”. He, accordingly, offered his guests venison instead.

Their natural habitat is near the river. In fact, they can remain under the water for eight or ten minutes. However, during the rainy season, they might be seen up to 20 miles from the banks of the nearest major river, but that is rare.

And this was a rare occasion.

Five Chigüires had wandered off, rooting for herbs and wild weeds, deep into the jungles south of the Orinoco and east of the Caroní, rivers whose banks during the rainy season expand for many miles. And beyond those banks, the rains create expansive swamps, rivulets, creeks, lakes, and ponds … far, far beyond.

The Tragavenado may be found on the ground. However, it is primarily arboreal, spending most of its time wrapped around low hanging branches waiting for quarry to pass below. For good reason, she is known as an ambush predator. She can capture and eat animals exceeding three times the size of her head, making the young chiguire an ideal prey.

The Tragavenado does not consider herself to be in the company of white gentlemen. For her dinner, the Chigüire’s greasy meat is satisfactory.

This Tragavenado was a large snake. Her body was coiled atop a thick, low hanging bough below which ran a small creek which appeared only during the rainy season. It was an hour before midnight; but that wasn’t an impediment since she recognized her prey by smell, not sight. She flicked her tongue in and out, picking up the Chiguire scent particles in the air, noting their approach. Chiguire flesh is possessed of a strong, musky smell, easily discernible to a predator such as the Tragavenado. Soon the nerve endings lodged in the scales around her mouth sensed the heat of the Chiguires, indicating her prey was near.

The Chigüires grazed under the large tropical oak tree overhanging the small creek. One of them was in the creek, directly beneath a large bough from which shot, at lightning speed, the head of the Tragavenado. She bit the top of the Chiguire’s neck with her sharp teeth and held on with her powerful jaws as she quickly dropped from the bough and wrapped her body entirely around the hapless Chiguire, whose companions had scattered off in different directions into the forest.

The Tragavenado has specialized scales, called scoots, on the belly to feel when the prey releases a breath, and then she squeezes tighter and tighter until her prey either suffocates or dies by cardiac arrest. The Chiguire soon stopped breathing and died and her conqueror began swallowing it whole, beginning with the head. Soon the dead Chiguire’s legs folded up and the carcass began going down smoothly into the body of the snake, whose muscles have wave-like contractions, sucking it even further and surging it downward with each bite.

She wouldn’t need to eat again for a very long time.

Chigüire, the world’s larges rodent.

Tragavenado

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, circa 1799

“I wish I had been there” is a familiar lament for many. It certainly applies to me with regards to the incident which follows.

In the camp’s early days, my father would travel to Ciudad Bolivar to pick up the month’s payroll. This was long before the bridges which now span the Caroní River and the multiple lane highways which came years later, during my lifetime, in fact.

Back in the 40s, the trip was very long and also required him to spend the night under the open sky, something he did not mind and did not consider dangerous, even though he carried the camp’s month’s pay, in cash. He was never threatened with theft.

On one of those trips my father was rewarded with a sight he often recalled: a black jaguar.

My father had a copy of Fauna Descriptiva de Venezuela, by Dr. Eduardo Röhl, published in 1949. As a child I would avidly thumb through that edition, pausing here and there to read more carefully when the subject especially struck my fancy.

I have my father’s copy with me and regarding the black jaguar it says that it “lives in the jungles of the Orinoco, [and] is a case of melanism”, meaning a genetic issue which causes the skin to hide the spots to greater or lesser degrees and highlight the black color. In Venezuela the terms jaguar or tigre are interchangeable, but all agree that the black version is rarely seen.

This comports with the Wikipedia article which affirms that black jaguars have been sighted throughout Central and South America, but rarely.

On one particular trip, late at night, my father was driving the stretch from Ciudad Bolívar to Puerto Ordaz, the confluence of the Caroní and Orinoco rivers, grateful for a full moon by which he might see the outline of a tree under which he could spend the night.

However, the moonlight rewarded him with a more dramatic sight that night. The landscape was clear even though it was late at night. The brush and sandy loam had the grayish, yellowish hue so common to a full moon. And then he sensed something to his immediate left, outside the driver’s door and open window.

It was black and it was running like a gazelle parallel to the car on the left side of the road. It seemed as if the perfectly formed, graceful creature were racing the car. My father could see the light of the moon reflected off the jaguar’s shiny black coat. The sight was mesmerizing. He kept looking, while quickly glancing to the road, as it ran and ran and ran. And then it swerved to its left and disappeared in the thickets and brush.

My father slowed the car and looked through his open window hoping to see the animal one more time. But, of course, he did not.

The jaguar is a nomadic creature with no fixed pathways for his nocturnal journeys. Its prey ranges from the clumsy Chigüire to tree-based monkeys of all kinds. During Humboldt’s years of discovery, the jaguar was the greatest enemy of the river turtles in Venezuela, which, by the time I left the country in the 70s, were often seen but nothing close to the abundance described by the great explorer.

Tag: Chigüire

Black Jaguar