"Presently a mongoose glided in emitting a peculiar whistle so efficacious in fascinating her chickens of immature growth but which has little effect on an egg. Approaching the eggs, it took one tenderly in its mouth and coiling its tail round another left the hen-house holding its head and tail high in the air and looking for all the world like a pair of spectacles. Having deposited the eggs in a space between the rocks of a stone wall bounding the premises it returned twice and secured the remainder of the eggs.
The woman watched the proceedings entranced... when she had seen the last two eggs disappear she seemed to come to suddenly and when her husband returned related to him in detail what she had seen. He is now busy experimenting with an explosive which will go off on being jarred and which he intends injecting into some egg shells from which the contents have been removed. By this means he hopes to teach the marauding mongooses in his section a lesson they will never forget."
With females producing up to three litters per year, with three pups per litter, mongoose populations quickly increased. Everything that moves is fair game for their supper (frogs, lizards, small mammals, birds, insects, slugs, snails) and they'll not hesitate to dine on some things that don't (fruit, plants, eggs). The nene, moli, and Newell's shearwater have been particularly hard hit by their maleficium. And it has been officially confirmed that they are now practicing their Dark Arts on Kaua'i. In May of 2012, a live mongoose was trapped at at the Marriott Kaua‘i Lagoons. And as Severus Snape warns us:
"The Dark Arts are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before."