HOW TO AVOID BEING BITTEN BY SNAKES

In houses and gardens:

v Learn to identify the local species of snakes and which ones are venomous. You need worry only about avoiding the venomous ones.

v Piles of debris (stacks of bricks, firewood, etc.) and rubble are good hiding places for snakes.

v Keep the surrounding area clear of low bushes, and hedges which are clear at the root base. The idea is to avoid providing cover for the snakes while approaching the house and for you to have a clear range of vision.

v Keep the house and surrounding area free of all rodents (prey) and rodent burrows (shelter).

v Use a torch/flashlight when walking outdoors at night.

v Sleep off the ground on a cot or bed or use a mosquito net, preferably both.

v If you see a snake, it is best to let it find its way out of the house by itself. If it is well settled in, use a hockey stick like curved stick to pick up the snake and drop into a tall bucket with lid. The snake can now be moved outdoors.

v Do not try to kill the snake as you can get bitten in the process.

v Encourage ratsnakes to live in the garden as they will eat all other snakes.

v Don’t reach into spots you cannot check for snakes first.

v A dog trained to fear snakes (get their nose bitten by a harmless watersnake when they are puppies) will warn you of the presence of one.

Outdoors:

v Avoid reaching your hands into stacks of straw, wood, etc.

v While walking at night always use a torch.

v Always wear footwear (of any kind).

v Watch where you step.

There is only one sure cure for venomous snakebite: antivenom serum. Most snake bites are not dangerous, only 10 to 15% of venomous bites prove serious enough to be potentially fatal. Check if the local hospital stocks anti-venom serum ahead of time. In case of a bite, go to the hospital immediately. First aid measures like pressure bandages, tourniquets, cut and suck are NOT recommended.

FIRST AID (courtesy http://www.lfsru.org/firstaid.htm)

The best and most effective instant action to take in case of snakebite is to follow the four point plan below:

1. Reassure the victim

Keep calm. Fear and panic will only raise the pulse rate and blood pressure and move the venom into the system faster. Tell the patient that most snakebites are from non-venomous species. Even most venomous bites are rarely serious but all bites should be watched for symptoms.

2. Immobilize the bitten limb without compression.

If the bite is on a hand or arm place it in a sling bandage or use a piece of cloth to support the arm. In the case of a leg bite, keep it still on a cushion of cloth or straw.

3. Carry the patient to hospital as fast as safely possible.

Don’t waste time washing the wound, seeking traditional remedies or applying any drugs or chemicals to the patient. Keep the patient as immobile as possible; carry the patient on a stretcher or ride in a vehicle, boat or bicycle. DO NOT WASTE TIME.

4. On the way to the hospital note any of the following signs and tell the Doctor.

The Doctor will want to know if any of the following signs or symptoms were seen on the journey to the hospital:

a) Difficulty in breathing

b) Drooping eyelids

c) Appearance of any unusual bruising

d) Swelling. Carry a pen and mark the limit of the swelling every 10 minutes or so

e) Drowsiness

f) Difficulty in speaking

g) Bleeding from the gums

h) Bleeding from the wound that does not seem to stop

Setting Free - issues relating to wildlife rescue and rehabilitation

Zoos' Print Vol. XXII No. 8, August 2007

One early morning we found a gunnysack on our doorstep that contained a baby toddy-cat. Its eyes were barely open and it lay asleep in blissful slumber. I fed it some milk with a small-animal feeding bottle left over from the days when I was rearing a litter of mongooses. As he grew and became more active by the day, I felt less energetic. He was nocturnal and I had to stay awake and play with him as I took my role as mummy seriously. I had read Joy Adamson’s books and was completely carried away by the romance of rearing baby animals.

When he was half-grown, we decided it was time to move him out of the house and introduce him to his future home. We propped a large cage – 5 feet x 5 feet x 7 feet –under the banyan tree behind the house and gave him a branch and a small sleeping box. A month later we opened the small door at the top of the cage so he could easily climb onto the banyan tree. He was frisky. He ran up to the top of the tree and came running towards us and ran up again. He wanted us to climb up and play with him! A couple of days later, he disappeared. The crown of the banyan tree was contiguous with a long hedgerow of palmyra trees. During the hot summer nights, scores of palm fruits drop to the ground with their husks torn apart. I like to think that our toddy-cat is one of the nocturnal feeders.

Over the years I wondered if I did right. I fed the toddy-cat bananas and other fruits and he loved to clamber up when I had a cup of yogurt. Where would he find bananas and yogurt in the wild? I also hand fed him; would he know where to find food now that he was on his own? Having interacted only with a couple of humans, would he know how to behave with another toddy-cat – would he know when and how to display submissiveness? Would he recognize and avoid predators like Great Horned Owls and pythons? I reprimanded him when he used his teeth too hard or when he jumped on me suddenly. Had I unwittingly altered his natural behaviour without thinking about the far-reaching effects it would have in his life out in the real world? Before the toddy-cat’s cage was opened, I didn’t get him screened for diseases. He could have harbored any infection and spread that to the wild toddy-cat population. After spending his growing years in the safe security of a well-bedded sleeping box, would he go through the trees looking for similar beds? I also do not have a clue what I had done to the local wildlife by releasing a series of small carnivores into the same habitat. It was time to re-consider why I went through the effort of rearing these wild creatures when everything seemed set against their survival. The unavoidable truth was that it made me feel good.

There are hundreds of people like me around the country who rescue birds, mammals, and reptiles. Most rehabilitators rear such animals in their homes and one fine day decide to release them in the jungle “where they belong.” On the other hand, most wildlife biologists and managers stay clear of such animal welfare concerns and as a result the rehabilitators are left to their own devices. Handicapped by the lack of guidelines that prescribe how to rear, where to rehabilitate these animals and with little scientific background and usually nil post-rehab monitoring, it is difficult for rehabilitators to judge if their methods work and what percentage of released animals survive.

The few studies that have occurred show that the overwhelming majority of such rehabilitated animals die of various causes. Listed here are some of common mistakes:

(a) Imprinting the young animals on humans

(b) Acclimatizing the animal to food that it is unlikely to find in the wild

(c) Inappropriate cage size, design and location

(d) Inadequate response to predators

(e) Behaviour alteration

(f) Choice of habitat for release

(g) Kind of release - soft or hard

(h) Non-assessment of the impact of the release on the resident population of the species at the site

If all this makes wildlife rescue seem like an expensive and difficult enterprise, that's because it is. In most cases rescuing animals interferes with the cycle of nature. Orphaned and injured animals if left alone will become prey to predators thus ensuring the continuance of natural law. We are interfering when we 'rescue' these animals and bring them home. Often animals are rescued on the mistaken belief that they need rescuing - every year several leopard cubs stashed by their mothers in the security of tea bushes are “rescued” forever making these large carnivores unsuitable for life in the wild.

Ideally wildlife rescue is recommended when every single animal’s life counts for the future survival of the species. In almost every other case the amount of money, time and effort needed to rear the animals may be better utilized in protecting the habitat. Perhaps the only exception to this rule is rescuing of animals who endanger the lives of humans, (venomous snakes), animals affected by a natural or artificial calamity (oil slick, development projects).

If, after reading these words of deterrence, you find yourself in a position where rescuing an animal is necessary then help is at hand. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) has requested Mike Jordan, Chair of the Re-Introduction Specialist Group (Europe and North Asia), to frame the necessary guidelines. A preliminary round of consultation with the South Asian members took place in Coimbatore in late Nov 2005 and a manual is expected to fill the long felt lacuna.

Viji, the Turtle Girl

When you delve into the history of herpetological conservation in India, as I did recently, you keep bumping into one personality called J. Vijaya. I have never met her and all I knew of her was that she spent most of her short life working on turtles and that there is a small memorial to her right next to the turtle pond at the Madras Crocodile Bank. Viji (as Vijaya was called) was India’s first woman herpetologist when such a career was unknown in this country.

Student days

Viji came to the Madras Snake Park as a volunteer in late 1975. She was then a first year zoology student at Ethiraj College, Chennai. She assisted the keepers in cleaning the cages, made sure that visitors didn’t throw stones at the animals, helped in the office and library and filled in for anything else that needed doing. Shekar Dattatri, then a school boy joined the Snake Park as a volunteer a few months later and remembers her as a very quiet person with the insular, focused interest of a Dian Fossey.

While Shekar played truant from school and spent all week hanging around the Snake Park, Viji could only visit on weekends. Besides doing little projects at the Snake Park, the duo went on short field trips together with the Irula tribals - to Vellore looking for rock lizards, to Mambakkam, Ottiyambakkam and Chitlapakkam and other places looking for small creatures like scorpions, lizards, snakes and geckos. Caring for animals in captivity at the Snake Park and observing wild ones in their habitat was a steep learning curve.

The first published mention of Viji surfaces in the September 1980 issue of Hamadryad, the newsletter of the Madras Snake Park in its early years and later Madras Crocodile Bank, when she wrote a short note on the breeding behaviour of mugger crocodiles. A September 1981 editorial mentions that she was working as a Research Associate on a project (which included checking wild scats and feeding captives) to assess the effectiveness of monitor lizards as rat predators. She had graduated by then and was working full-time at the Snake Park.

A turtle biologist is born

In those early days when herpetological conservation was still nascent, Romulus Whitaker, her boss at Madras Snake Park was assigning various people to different critters – Satish Bhaskar to nesting sea turtles, Valliappan to sea turtles in the meat markets of Tuticorin – and he might have put Viji onto freshwater turtles. Once, Rom and a team from Snake Park including Viji, went to the Indian Institute of Technology campus to catch a couple of crocs that had escaped from the Children’s Park Zoo. Near the edge of the huge sewage treatment ponds, they came upon hundreds of turtle eggshells, dug up and strewn around by mongooses. That was the first inkling they had about how common the Indian flapshell Lissemys punctata and the Indian black turtle Melanochelys trijuga were. Viji began collecting data on the turtles’ nest size, number of eggs per clutch and nest survival (precious few!) and that may have been the decisive moment.

Shekar remembers returning from a field trip to Sri Lanka with Viji clutching an old frayed bag of the Indian black turtles. At the Customs check, she had to open the leaking bag for inspection when the turtles began pissing in unison. It made an already cumbersome procedure smellier. He laughed as he recalled affectionately, “She’d do things that I wouldn’t dream of doing.”

At this time, Edward Moll, the Chairman of the World Conservation Union’s Freshwater Chelonian Specialist Group needed an assistant for a nation-wide survey of turtles and Rom, who was a member of the group recommended Viji, who was just 22 then, for the job.

The first surveys

The survey got underway in August-September 1981 and she traveled up to West Bengal (the major consumer of freshwater turtles in the country) to meet up with Pankaj Manna of the University of Calcutta, the other team member. With Pankaj as translator, they began with the meat markets. Thousands of Indian softshell turtles Aspideretes gangeticus and narrow-headed softshell turtles Chitra indica came for sale during the winter months - when the water was low and the creatures were easy to trap, hook, or catch with bare hands. The price of turtle meat plummeted from Rs. 18 to Rs. 5 per kilo during these months; “it was cheaper than beef,” Viji reported.

From Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, she wrote about the movement of the turtle trade - most went to Bengal but some found their way to Assam. Initially turtle exploitation was confined to the states immediately around Bengal. But by the time of her visit, states further upriver like UP were being hunted for the Bengali markets (Viji would eventually discover that turtle exploitation extended as far up as the Punjab). On a typical day, 10 baskets of 10-20 turtles each, along with freshwater fish from reservoirs and rivers were sent by train from UP alone. The market was big and the business competitive; at least 20 agents worked the River Rapti. Viji also documented how turtles were caught by harpooning and hooking. The hapless turtles were flipped on their backs and their flippers stitched together with binding wire for the journey to Bengal. In 1981, the catchers were already complaining about the small size of turtles (5-10 kg. range); 10 years earlier they were easily able to catch 40-70 kg. ones. Based on Viji’s findings Ed Moll estimated that 50,000 to 75,000 Indian flapshells, 7,000 to 8,000 large softshells and at least 10,000 to 15,000 hardshell turtles were coming into the Howrah market in Calcutta annually. He felt that the latter was probably an underestimate, because on one day in May 1983 (off- season), he witnessed over 350 large hardshell turtles being auctioned off.

It can’t have been easy doing this work as most of the places Viji visited were the ‘badlands’ or ‘wild west’ of India – the Chambal ravines with its dacoits, Bhagalpur (at time of the infamous Bhagalpur blindings), crowded, goon-infested parts of UP. But she was totally oblivious to anything besides turtles. The black and white pictures she took of the gory Ridley sea turtle slaughter on Digha beach and in the meat markets of Calcutta, shook the public when India Today magazine ran them in the early 1980s. This was the first media expose ever done on the free-for-all trade in sea turtles and highlights the difference one individual can make for conservation.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi took action (another woman who dramatically affected conservation in India) immediately and overnight, sea turtle exploitation was cut to a trickle. Mrs. Gandhi also wrote to the Coast Guard asking them to protect sea turtles, a tradition that still continues. Ironically, the present govt. has abdicated its role as caretaker of India’s wildlife by allowing ports and other developments along the coast that are detrimental to the turtles’ continued survival.

The forest cane turtle

The forest cane turtle (at that time Heosemys silvatica) was at the top of the agenda of the Freshwater Chelonian Specialist Group. Viji decided to go and look for the obscure little turtle in Kerala which hadn’t been seen for 67 years. Only two specimens of the species had ever been recorded by a Dr. Henderson (of the Madras Museum) in October 1911 from Kavalai. Henderson describes the locality as “20 miles from Chalakudi, the starting point of the forest tramway service.” When Viji planned her trip, she discovered that ‘Kavalai’ meant ‘crossing or junction’, the tramway had long since fallen into disuse and every district in Kerala seemed to have a village by that name. She somehow made contact with the Kadar tribals in Chalakudi and sought their help. She wrote: “The ‘Moopan’, or headman, was appointed to accompany me as he was the oldest man available to accompany a girl into the forest. Moopan, whose actual name I was never allowed to address, was a dignified man four and half feet tall with a serene face. Rain or shine, we would go out with his big umbrella and his sickle, which he used to chop off plants to make way in the jungle.” She was finally able to find a cane turtle in July 1982 and that shot her into the international herpetological limelight.

Shekar remembers that first turtle well. “The first time Viji got one back to Madras, she brought it to my house. So long as it was daylight and as long as someone was watching it, the turtle would not come out. When it was pitch dark, it would slowly put its head out. The moment you shone a torch, it went back in. This was the most bizarre creature I’ve ever met.” Perhaps what captured everyone’s imagination most was that Viji saw wild cane turtles ‘dive’ under leaves when frightened, just the way an aquatic turtle would dive into the water. Henderson also recorded the fact that this turtle “did not affect the neighbourhood of water, a fact borne out by the absence of webbed digits.”

In December 1982, one of the female cane turtles Viji brought back laid a clutch of two eggs. She discovered that this species wasn’t a vegetarian as earlier thought. Besides eating fruit and fungi, it fed on invertebrates such as millipedes, molluscs and beetles. From knowing virtually nothing about the animal, Viji made a quantum leap in documenting what this turtle was about.

Unbeknownst to the scientists who considered the turtle “lost” for close to 70 years, several cane turtles were sold in the European pet trade as Tricarinate hill turtle Melanochelys tricarinata or Indian black turtle in the 1960s and 70s. One of the turtle hobbyists who bought several was Reiner Praschag who maintained them in captivity in Austria for many years.

Research and conservation

Rom remembers a clutch of Indian flapshell turtle eggs Viji had been incubating under a tin roof shed at the Croc Bank. It had already been about 300 days when Rom remembers writing them off as dead, but Viji persevered. The Irula tribals had told Viji that the sound of thunder makes turtle eggs hatch. A couple of weeks later, it rained for half an hour and on cue the eggs hatched. Viji excitedly said that there had been no thunder; the rain beating on the tin roof was what did it. It would be wonderful to learn more about this intriguing aspect of turtle behaviour.

By the end of 1982, Viji had a captive breeding group of cane turtles and Travancore tortoises established at the Croc Bank. She set up a field camp in the Nadukkani forest (a very remote and pristine forest, with the least damage wrought by fire), Kerala to study these two chelonians. It was several kilometres from the nearest Kadar village and it was a challenge to get there even on a good weather day. She lived alone in a cave, the former abode of leopards and bears, for several months at a time far from any help should anything have happened.

Here she captured and notched 125 turtles; if any of these turtles were caught again she would know how far they had traveled since being released. She also extended the range of what was being called India’s rarest turtle to Neyyar Sanctuary in Kerala (200 km. south of Kavalai), and to Agumbe in Karnataka (over 200 km. north of Kavalai).

Shekar also mentions Viji’s incredible sense of direction. He said anyone going into the forest with her didn’t have to worry about keeping track of where they were going or mentally marking particular trees to find their way back. She could wander through an unfamiliar forest for kilometres, without stopping to take stock of her bearings, and yet unerringly find her way back without an effort. Besides, while the rest of the group was cautiously keeping an eye out for elephants, she merely strolled through paying no attention to leeches, ticks or elephants. She was completely at home in the forest and no inconvenience fazed her.

In addition to capture-mark-releasing of turtles, Viji also carried out the first studies in Indian forests on tracking the movements of turtles. In 1983, Viji’s operating budget was about Rs. 900 a month (including salary). There was no way that the Snake Park could afford radio telemetry equipment but she did the best she could with what was available. She stuck a spool of thread onto the carapace of the turtles with Araldite and let them wander. Following the thread, she could then get at least a general idea of daily activity patterns and even figure out the approximate home range of the animals she was studying.

The end

Ed says Viji was an excellent field biologist whose best traits were her perseverance and her ability to observe. She did not have a strong biological background to interpret the data she was collecting and Ed invited her to Eastern Illinois University to do her Masters. In September 1984, Viji left for the States to do her post graduation under Ed Moll and later returned to India to do field studies. In April 1987, she was found dead, of unknown causes, in the forest she loved; she was 28.

Epilogue

In 2006, 19 years later, her name was formally given to the cane turtle that she spent so much of her time studying – Peter Praschag, the son of Reiner Praschag, and several other herpetologists analysed the DNA of Reiner’s now-dead turtles and recently re-named the turtle Vijayachelys silvatica in her honour. It is a monotypic genus, which means that there is no other turtle like it to share the name of Vijayachelys. Just as there are very few other people like Viji.

This article was based on interviews with filmmaker/conservationist (and one of Viji’s few friends), Shekar Dattatri, Rom Whitaker and Ed Moll, her professor.

THE AGUMBE RAINFOREST RESEARCH STATION

Published in Hornbill July-September 2005

If you are a researcher in the Western Ghats who is tired of staying in Inspection Bungalows or Forest rest houses under the threat of eviction anytime and your experience of life in the jungle is the same as mine, read on. My memory of working in the rainforests of the Western Ghats goes like this – wet tent, damp firewood, leeches galore, mouldy clothes, an unending series of dinners of semolina, instant noodles, rice and dhal and a desperate craving for pizza. Of course, there is the bright side of camping – of time spent watching a giant millipede make its way across the leaf litter, glow-worms that light up the night like earth bound stars, lizards that seem like butterflies as they glide from tree to tree, waking to the call of the Malabar Whistling Thrush. For a late blooming naturalist like me whose idea of comfort was four walls and a bed, the dreariness of camping (which hits a low at nightfall) outweighed the joyfulness (during the day) and I suspect that’s the reason why so many field researchers drop by the wayside in India. Rom Whitaker decided that if the researchers can’t be brought to the mountains, then the mountains will have to meet them half-way. That was how the idea of the field station began more than a year ago.

But why in Agumbe, you may well ask? Agumbe holds a special place in Rom’s affection as he caught his first king cobra there back in 1971. He has since visited the place as often as he can. When the rest of the country’s towns and cities are undergoing a vast transformation, Agumbe has remained the same for the last 35 years and that appealed to Rom. Ok, there are a couple of tea stalls extra but that is the only visible change. The people are still warm and effusive, bringing you hot steaming cups of heavenly kashayam (a non-caffeinated medicinal drink) to ward off the rainy chills. It also helps that the people here have a reverence for king cobras, missing elsewhere. In one case a king cobra strayed into a bathroom and the people of the household lived with it for three days before seeking our help. They consider it a god who has graced their house and they were very particular that we didn’t harm the snake (or anger it) in any way. “That’s half the battle won,” Rom said in admiration. After living all his life in places where it was hard to convince local people to let snakes live, it was a welcome sign of relief that he didn’t have to do any proselytizing here. Rom’s dream was also to have a station where king cobras casually cross the backyard to drink from the spring and he found it in Agumbe.

Agumbe is only a non-glamorous Reserve Forest but adjacent to one of the last surviving lowland rainforests, Someshwara Wildlife Sanctuary and the more famous Kudremukh National Park. A couple of kilometers from the town into the Reserve Forest, Rom came across an eight-acre agricultural land. When we heard that the family was looking for a buyer we began scrounging for money. We didn’t have any but Rom’s mum, Doris Norden, said she had some money she would like to give him for the cause. Hectic parleying began with the owners but before the deal could be concluded Doris died. Exactly a year later, Rom bought that piece of land with money his mother had willed him and finally Rom was the proud owner of land in prime king cobra territory.

In April 2005, Rom won the Whitley Award, which would help set up cottages, buy basic scientific equipment, and a vehicle. The land is not connected to the electric grid and Rom decided he wanted a place that was a model of sustainability – a hybrid of solar and hydel electricity would power the station. It’s easier said than done unless you have expert help which we found in Jos van den Akker of Auroville. Jos found ways to cut costs and put us in touch with hydel power expert, Ramasubramanian.

We needed help with building designs and blueprints so Srikumar Menon, a faculty member of the Manipal Institute of Technology volunteered his help. A team of his architectural students have come up with a design for the cottages and during the first week of December 2005, construction will begin. It finally seemed likely that the rainforest research station would transcend from a dream to reality.

Naturenet Café is the name of the local village information centre that Rom dreams of setting up in tandem with the field station. With high speed broadband and intranet connectivity, local farmers can find the best market prices for their produce, school students can get trained in the new technology, information on sustainable ways of farming, land use, ecology, wildlife will be made available here. Passing tourists can purchase locally made handicrafts and information on the rainforest, not to mention hot cups of kashayam, king cobra T-shirts and merchandise. For me, it’s just the place to do emails without having to hike up to Thirthahalli or down to Manipal.

It has been a frustrating few months – we had the money and the designs but the monsoon was in full swing. At the time of writing Agumbe had already received more than 7000 mm of rain, reportedly next only to Cherrapunji. As we sat in the courtyard of the old mud farmhouse and watched the rain swirl round and round, a flock of woolly necked storks walked in and out of the mist. Birders visiting the station made a casual list of 200 species of birds, barking deer visit the land in plain sight of the house, a troop of common langurs are shy neighbours and of course there are the king cobras.

P. Gowri Shankar is the intrepid Education Officer who lives on site. In between visiting local schools and colleges on environment education campaigns, he has caught 18 king cobras from people’s houses, gardens, wells and plantations. Early this year he became the first researcher to ever witness a wild king cobra making her nest. Rom scurried around for a video camera to send Gowri but by that time nest building was complete. The mother abandoned her nest after a few days because of local disturbance nearby – a land owner decided to set fire to a massive trunk of tree which smoldered for days. Smoke is anathema to snakes and it effectively drove the mother snake away. Similarly temperatures and humidity of two other nests (both also abandoned by the mother snake) on private estates were monitored throughout the entire period of incubation and the results of the first such studies of wild nests are beginning to emerge. In all instances, Rom put his hand deep into the nest to put in data loggers and reported that the packed mound of vegetation kept the eggs dry during the torrential rains. The output from the data logger however, suggests that the pile of leaf litter does not raise the temperature of the nest chamber. These wild nests took a lot longer than captive eggs to hatch because of the low temperatures they incubated in but they produced very healthy, sturdy babies. Surprising too was the hatching rate of 99% - we thought we were doing well with 60% in captivity. The natural incubator the mother king cobra makes from leaves somehow keeps the eggs healthy while no man-made incubator seems capable of maintaining the high humidity without a fungal attack.

One observant villager mentioned that he had seen the mother king cobra bask in the morning light and then go into her nest. Perhaps she was bringing additional heat into a cool nest to aid incubation? Maybe there was survival merit in speeding up incubation so the eggs remained vulnerable only for a short time. Until we find a nest with a guarding female, this will remain mere speculation. And therein lies the conundrum – female king cobras in the Western Ghats seem to be very sensitive to disturbance. They seem to flee at the first smell of danger and yet we have heard of occasional persistent females who tried to return to their nests for days despite being repeatedly chased away by people. It’s a matter of time before we come upon a determined nest guarding king cobra and until then the questions will remain.

In March this year Gowri was called to a house to catch a king cobra that had fallen in to a well. After considerable difficulty he pulled out a male. The very next day the same people called Gowri to catch a king cobra which had fallen into the well. It turned out to be a female. Intriguingly this leads us to surmise that female king cobras may actively seek their mates.

In April we visited a nest abandoned by the mother king cobra who had been making a nest in the same place for the last three years, according to the villagers. If this is true (and you can be sure we will be there next nesting season) this will be the first recorded evidence of king cobra nest-site fidelity in India. Every single nest site we have seen in the last two years has been GPS marked (as was every capture and relocation) and in the following years, it would be interesting to see if nest-site fidelity is the norm.

One of the questions also remaining to be answered is – why do king cobras gravitate towards habitation. For years, the standard reply was because rats live with people; rat snakes come to eat rats and king cobras follow to eat the rat snakes. But there is a possibility that king cobras living close to villages may seek coolness during the hot dry months and warmth in the cold rainy months. We make convenient cave-like dwellings (we call houses) that provide the optimum temperature for a snake when the weather is harsh.

We hope the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station will function in just the same way for researchers – a cool place to hang out in the middle of the rainforest.

A Journey to the Edge of the World

Published in Outlook Traveller Oct 2005 as "Andamans: Desert Island Days"

“Let’s go take a close look at that crocodile,” Neel suggested and Harry and I agreed gamely. We were at the Wandoor jetty, South Andaman watching a seven-foot salt-water crocodile swimming sedately in a narrow channel between Alexandra Island and us. Neel revved the zippy inflatable boat straight towards the croc. Harry and I thought he was giving us an adrenalin rush and we were determined not to react. When it seemed that we were imminently going to land on top of the crocodile I began squeaking incoherently. But it was too late. The astonished saltie (not a savory but the affectionate name by which croc specialists call the salt-water crocodile) dived underwater as we zoomed up to where his head had been. “What are you doing?” I spluttered. “What if the croc had bitten through the boat?” He couldn’t believe a croc would do that. He had obviously not read those infamous tales of salties biting propellers and outboard motors in Australia. The Andaman saltie hadn’t either, so why was I getting worked up about it, Neel asked. I made a mental note to lend him my book of croc attacks for bedtime reading when we got back home. That should enlighten him, I decided, but it would have to wait. We were preparing for an expedition to South Sentinel Island, a tiny uninhabited island near Little Andaman Island and this near-disaster was the first field test of the rubber boat before we packed it.

The daylight trip would take us to the island at low tide when it would be too shallow to pull up the long massive dugout canoes, Rom had declared after peering for a long time at the Bay of Bengal pilot book. So the plan was to anchor offshore and use the rubber boat to ferry the gear and people to land. Harry, Neel and I had spent the day stocking rations, organizing barrels to carry fresh water (there was no fresh water on the island), diesel for the two motors and petrol for the generator to charge batteries. Harry had just single-handedly managed to obtain permits after two months of running around and there was no time to lose.

South Sentinel is one of the two outlying islands west of the Andaman chain. If you are looking at a map, the little dot way off the west coast of Little Andaman is the island we were headed for.

That night while we sat on the wooden deck of the kitchen, swatting mosquitoes and sipping whisky, I overhead Neel deep in conversation with Saw Pawng (whom everyone called Uncle), our 80 year old chief of the boat crew. Uncle was appalled to hear that the world was round and not flat. Splendid! Here was our boat captain who thinks he might fall off the face of the world if he kept going straight on. I hurriedly bid everyone goodnight before Neel began bringing Uncle up to speed on the scientific developments of the last two centuries. What Uncle didn’t know hadn’t hurt him and what I didn’t know that Uncle didn’t know, couldn’t hurt me.

Rom arrived the next day. After reviewing the food, water, fuel, gear and people, Rom had to ask Neel to stay. “You drink too much water, man,” he tried to explain to his dejected brother. Through the day Neel guzzled as much water as his high metabolism sweated out. But having swung into the spirit of adventure, to be grounded must have been disappointing.

While packing the two canoes with everyone’s bags, rations, and equipment, Uncle was muttering something about the world being flat. Oh, how I wish Neel had not gotten this bee into Uncle’s bonnet! Once everything was strapped in place Uncle shouted “Chaabo!” (Let’s go!), the Karen call to adventure. “Remember the world is round, Uncle!” shouted Neel with a wink and a wave. I glared darkly at Neel while Uncle hesitantly brought his hand up to wave and I swore I was going to give him the goriest croc attack book on earth. With pictures of body parts.

Along with us five mainlanders were six Karen. The Karen were brought over from Burma by the British in the 1920s to work in the islands. Two of them were in charge of each canoe – one operated the motor and the other bailed out water that seeped in. Traditionally the Karen rowed and poled their way around the islands until one day an enterprising Karen did something ingenious – by patching together a regular 8 hp Kirloskar water pump motor, a length of pipe and a propeller, he had a motor boat. Overnight the motorized dugout canoe became the most efficient vehicle on the waters of the Andaman Sea. Before we teamed up with the Karen, we used fiberglass and trawler boats but if something went wrong (and it always does) in the high seas, there was no one to call. Even on dry land, it was pretty hard to find a resourceful mechanic to fix the problem. But with the dugout canoes, the Karen could pretty much strip the pump down and put it back together with the efficiency of a drill sergeant.

The thoughtful Karen had built a tarpaulin shade for us wimpy mainlanders. If it were not for this shade, we would have all begun shedding our skins in a couple of days from sunburn. As we sat cooped up inside hiding from the blistering sun, the Karen were having the time of their lives. These normally taciturn guys became lively and agile when their canoes skimmed the waters, the sun beat down on their bronze weather-beaten skins and the wind whipped their straight hair away from their faces. Schwete, the most reserved of the Karen, transformed into an exuberant whooping cowboy. With the two canoes racing at full speed nose to nose, Schwete nimbly jumped from one boat to the other to pass the thermos of tea. Just when I thought, “Phew! Did you see that?” he stood straddling the two boats, a foot on each canoe, as they knifed side by side through the azure blue waters. If you thought Kevin Costner was cool in ‘Water World’ you should have seen this kid!

Five hours later, with the sun directly overhead we lost sight of land; we were out in the high seas with no landmark, no stars, nothing to indicate which was north or south. Neither Uncle nor Saw Pamwe (the other boat captain) had a watch, compass or any technological gizmo to consult. Had somebody brought a compass? The thought hadn’t occurred to anyone. I knew we were heading southwest, but the crux of the issue was what degree southwest were we? If we went too south-westerly we would zip between North Sentinel and South Sentinel islands without catching sight of either and make landfall in Sri Lanka or worse, Madagascar. Uncle just bit into his beedi and puffed, his eyes fixed on some imaginary spot on the horizon. Was he going to take us to South Sentinel or to confirm that the earth was flat? There, out in the middle of nowhere, without the familiar profile of land anywhere, I began to question the sanity of this enterprise. The heat and humidity clogged my brain and soon I was asleep.

I woke up gasping for fresh air; the foul fumes of exhaust filled my lungs. We were chugging slowly and I looked around for an explanation. We had arrived. South Sentinel looked like an island should – waves beating on the sand with the calm rhythm of the world’s heartbeat, the white coral sand, the cool green of the forest beyond. The only thing that spoilt the picture was a lighthouse that stuck out like a middle finger above the forest. The engine finally went dead and we anchored. It was about 3 pm. The inflatable boat was pressed into service and the long process of unloading began. It was well past dusk when we finished. The once pristine beach was pulped and churned by human footprints. There had been a water monitor track on the beach when we had first arrived but it was quickly obliterated.

In the meantime camp was being made. While dinner of rice and dal was cooking, we bathed in the sea and used one mug of fresh water to rinse off before toweling dry. Sitting around the campfire, eating the most delicious dinner, watching the phosphorescent waves gleaming in the dark and smelling of insect repellent in the air was enough to make anyone sigh contentedly.

We woke up early the next morning to see enormous tractor tracks up and down the beach – nesting green sea turtle tracks. High above us a pair of white-bellied sea eagles wheeled over the island, like guardian angels. After a quick breakfast, everyone kitted up and set off for a walk into the island. It’s a tiny island, only 161 ha. Along the forest edge the sand moved with millions of hermit crabs of varying shapes and sizes and the much larger land crabs of different colours from brown, orange to yellow. Tall pandanus trees shielded the forest from the strong winds blowing off the ocean. The further inland we went, the taller the trees rose. The soil was sandy and several trees had keeled over. We found pieces of broken coral, seashells and other relics of a time long ago when this island was merely a patch of ocean bed.

Smack in the middle of the island was a large circular clearing with an island of beautiful palms and tiger ferns. It looked as if someone had manicured it to make it look just right. We soon found out why the area was clear – it was a tidal swamp. When the tide came in, seawater seeped up from underground and filled the clearing. When the tide went out, the pond drained to become a clearing once again. We found several enormous coconut crabs, the largest land crab in the world, milling about in the clearing. While we stood there silently taking in the vision, I felt something tickle my ankle. It was a coconut crab checking me out, its antennae quivered with unfamiliarity. Schwete tactfully grabbed the crab behind and held it up for me to take a good look. These purplish 10-legged creatures probably have seen so few humans that they were curious.

After dinner I read my notes on the coconut crab. It is eaten as a delicacy throughout its range – islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. But no Indian has developed a taste for it yet and it seemed to be thriving here. It grows to a phenomenal two feet in length, and weighs as much as four kilograms. It is known to climb coconut trees, chop the fruits letting them fall down, walk head first to the ground and hack through the fruit with its pincers to get to the tender flesh inside; but not always in that order. The most far-out thing about these crabs is this - their breathing organ is a cross between gills and lungs and it can breathe only when the organ is wet with seawater. So a pair of legs is totally dedicated to keeping this organ clean and moist. The notes also said that if you wanted to see these crabs during daytime on Christmas Island or any of the other islands of the Pacific Ocean, you had to dig them out from burrows. Obviously whoever wrote the paper hadn’t been on South Sentinel. Here, they come over to nibble at you curiously in broad daylight!

In the morning Harry hauled out a massive wooden chest. Were we going to play ‘treasure island’? Harry replied it was for keeping coconut crabs. The Port Blair zoo wanted us to bring them a pair of the crabs. Wasn’t it overkill? Harry replied, “The box has to be strong. Otherwise, the crabs will rip their way through.” I pursed my lips and considered the chest. It seemed unlikely any living creature could get out of there – it was solid. I mean, REALLY solid. It took four people to haul the chest and we headed off into the jungle.

Rom caught the first coconut crab and tried to put it into the wooden chest. By the time he got done, his hands was gouged and scratched by its sharp claw-like legs. We searched long and hard and could find no more signs of the water monitor lizards. This was a big disappointment as I was looking forward to seeing the lizards foraging in the coral reef at low tide as Harry had described it. Back at the camp we tried to feed the crab the contents of a chicken egg. It ate some but got distracted and tried to crawl into the camera lens instead. “It’s spooked,” said Rom. To me, it seemed hungry for media attention. While I was playing with the crab, a team headed off into the jungle to continue the hunt for monitor lizards. I went to get something more interesting for the crab and found some dried salted fish. I rinsed off the salt and returned to the crab only to see that it had completely mangled the steel tumbler I had been drinking tea from. I shuddered at the thought of what it could have done to my Achilles tendon on our first meeting. I promptly decided to return him to his box – a job easier said than done.

The team came back with the news that they had sighted about 14 lizards in a wet marshy area but they acted skittish, dashing off in a split instant. We began wondering what could have caused this nervousness – the lighthouse builders, poachers? We decided to visit this marsh again the next day.

We approached as silently as we could. No lizards. It was to be expected but still very disappointing. Rom had an idea that if we constructed a hide near the marsh and waited quietly, we might see some lizards. So the Karen set to work and I volunteered to stay in the hide. Coconut crabs and land crabs scurried busily all around me in the dry leaf litter. White-eyes flitted close by. Parakeets filled the air with their raucous cries. I waited and watched but nothing exciting happened - unless you count a coy pigeon making a sorry example of a nest exciting. Perhaps the lizards were still edgy from yesterday. It’s amazing how tired and hungry one gets sitting immobile in a hide.

Within a few days, we were low on water and Uncle had to go to Little Andaman’s Bumila Creek to get more water. The sea had been getting rougher everyday and he had a hard time getting into his canoe; two of the younger Karen boys had to hoist him up. Just then Harry discovered that the captive coconut crab had escaped. I thought he was kidding – that box was a little Fort Knox. But it was true, the crab had pried the edge of the chest apart fibre by fibre and had made a hole big enough to escape. That was the end of that idea.

One morning I climbed up the lighthouse to get an “aerial” view of the island. A series of metal ladders welded to the metal structure shook in the strong wind. Even as I was climbing to the treetop level, my knees were trembling and I forced myself not to look down. But once I surfaced onto the platform atop the structure the magnitude of the view took my breath away. Even as I was trying to figure out the various features of the island sprawled around below me, something white in the sea caught my attention. It was an albino green sea turtle. Knowing fully well that none would believe me, I managed to get a rather shaky video shot of it to be produced with flourish later. A few months later, we were to discover that white green sea turtles were not a rarity at all. They come up with fair regularity on the Sri Lankan coasts and a couple of sea turtle hatcheries there maintained a few in captivity. But nevertheless, it was exciting at that moment to witness a living specimen of aberrant nature. “What a fantastic place!” I wrote mundanely in my journal at a typical loss for words.

Towards evening we began to get worried. There was no sign of Uncle and the Karen who had gone to fetch water. They were supposed to have been back by afternoon and we were down to the last bucket of water. Although we weren’t extravagant with the water, we cut down our consumption further, drinking a sip only when we had to. But we decided to wait one more night before getting worked up about it.

We lazed in the shade of the camp, not wanting to work ourselves into a sweat when we were low on water. The sea eagles resumed their vigil over the island, their lonely calls piercing the air. It was mid-morning when the canoes came into view as they rounded the limestone cliffs on the eastern side of the island. A collective sigh of relief went up. The river mouth in Little Andaman had been pummeled by tall waves, Uncle said, and they had risked being drowned when they attempted to get out into the sea. The boys apparently hadn’t want to leave in such choppy waters but Uncle knew we would be really low on water and was determined to make it. As we sat on fallen logs hungrily eating fried fish, a school of dolphins came bounding like a lot of marine puppies. They had hemmed a school of fish against the shore. This was the life – good food, pristine beach (well, almost), good sleep under the purest skies and lots of fresh water. That’s when I heard Uncle talking to Uncle Pamwe in Karen. I couldn’t understand their language but I knew instantly what they were talking about. Uncle’s hands were saying something like “Did you know that the earth is round?” I smiled. Uncle may not know these larger facts of life but he sure as hell knew where every speck of island, inhabited or uninhabited, was around these parts and that is all that mattered.

At sunset one evening, Johnny went diving under the surf and came up to present me a big gorgeous live cowrie. I was touched but tried to tell him gently that I don’t like to take live animals. I felt bad rejecting his present – he was only trying to give me a gift in return for the cap I had given him earlier.

The next day we headed back to Wandoor. The sea was calm and the canoes could be brought ashore. This made loading so much easier and quicker. Within half an hour almost everything was on board. After ten days on the island, I looked forward to a clean bath but I was also sad that we were leaving. We skirted North Sentinel and the sharp eyes of Uncle spotted a couple of Sentinelese on the beach. Dolphins raced alongside us until they got bored – our boats were too slow for the speeds they were accustomed to. It was dark by the time we dropped anchor at Wandoor. We discovered Neel had in the meantime vacationed on Havelock Island so he couldn’t guilt-trip us. After all these days of washing in the sea, my hairbrush was thick with greasy dirt and my hair was limp and sticky. I got most of the gritty fine sand out of my hair that evening and cherished the privacy of a room for the first time in a long time.

After dinner when Neel got started off on how the earth revolves around the sun all of us burst out laughing. Uncle looked puzzled for a moment and he laughed too. He had been right all along – Neel had just been pulling his leg.

Epilogue: Schwete died tragically of cerebral malaria after a trip to the Nicobars at the age of 21. The tsunami pushed the island up about a metre out of the sea but the beach we camped on is underwater while the inter-tidal pools are now permanently exposed. No one knows yet if the coconut crab population was affected. If the accretion of beach on other islands is anything to go by, a beach may soon start forming on South Sentinel again. Someone should make the trip out there and check it out.

The King Cobra and I

Published in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XX No. 4, Aug 2000 and The Hemispheres Vol.1, No. 2

We were filming two male king cobras engaged in combat in the damp forests of Agumbe when one suddenly turned and headed straight for Rom. Caught on the wrong foot and unable to move, he chose to stand still. The king cobra shot past between his legs and just as everyone was beginning to draw a relieved breath, the snake turned around behind him and latched onto the seat of Rom’s jeans. In the absolute silence, everyone could hear the sound of its teeth ripping through the fabric, besides their own hearts thudding in their ears. And then the snake was off again, to continue with his battle without even grazing the skin of Rom’s posterior. Rom still maintains that it was his Levi’s that saved his ass!

When Romulus Whitaker and I decided to work together on a film, the subject was already chosen. Novices in the field, we had to get a toehold in the business. The only creature we could think of that nobody else had made a film on, and was so unique that only we would be in a position to pull it off, was the king cobra. It was also the only creature at that time on which Rom wanted to make a film. His relationship with the species stretching over a long period of time and he has had several encounters with them in the wild and in captivity. So 'King Cobra', the film, was woven around these episodes.

There were a few notes on its courtship behaviour written by colleagues in the Madras Snake Park and others in U.S. zoos. But aside from this, there was precious little we could find. So we had to start from scratch. We put the word out all along the Western Ghats from Goa to Kerala that any information on their nests. The two years that followed was a period of intense education for me. It was my first encounter with the wilds of India, let alone king cobras. We stayed with friends or at forest bungalows in various National Parks; where hospitality was unavailable, we camped in the forest. To me, the last option was very unnerving. Spooked by stories of other people's misadventures, my perception of the forest was of a frightful monster ready to grab me when I was the least aware. My uneasiness probably irritated Rom no end but he was accommodating. The worst time (yet the best in hindsight) was when we camped in the forests of Agumbe.

Agumbe, a haven for creepy crawlies

Agumbe is the wettest place in South India and Rom had caught king cobras there in the past. In his early days he would camp regularly in these damp forests looking for snakes. On one such trip, he saw a black snake tail disappear into a thick bush and instinctively dived for it. Even as he almost shattered his elbows with the fall, his mind was telling him that it was a rat snake until an apparition of a spreading hood growled over his sprawled body. There wasn't much he could really do considering the position he was in, so he let the king cobra's tail go. That was the beginning of Rom's life long fascination with the species.

Rom considers Agumbe the 'king cobra capital'. To me it just seemed like 'leech capital'! We were camped there for a couple of days living on instant noodles and smoke flavoured tea (which we strained through our butterfly net). We saw little of any of the larger animals, the largest we saw was a barking deer; but we saw lots of smaller things - frogs, slugs, scorpions, millipedes of all shapes and sizes, huge tadpoles that don't metamorphose into frogs, insects, birds like the Shama and Malabar trogon. It was great yet eerie to not see any humans about. The place was so damp that anything dry became wet in minutes. Coming from the city as I did, the dankness and the closed canopy of the forest made me intensely claustrophobic. I hankered to see dry open stretches of land, like tea estates, much to Rom’s disgust. But the many different and new things we were seeing kept me going in what seemed like miserable circumstances.

It was a voyage of discovery for me - watching Rom dig into an embankment to reveal the largest spider I've ever seen - a mygalomorph tarantula the size of his hand. From watching the flight of flying lizards to hearing the chirpy, quiet human-like calls of the lion-tailed macaques in the canopy, I had travelled miles from being a paranoid city animal to being an appreciative amateur naturalist. Now every turn in the path would raise my anticipations of seeing a king cobra. But we saw very little of king cobras in all this time but at least we were exploring their domain - that was our excuse for being in these forests for the length of time we did.

Meanwhile we were coaxing National Geographic Television to help us make the film. Understandably reticent at first about putting their money on such an elusive subject, they eventually were enterprising enough to support us fully. It took a few months to put a crew together and work out the logistics. We were finally at the brink of what we had so often dreamed of in the last two years. It was January when we began, at the start of the king cobra courtship and mating period.

Royal romance

During this season, the female king cobra lays a trail of scent as she crawls. This scent is potent enough to bring any passing male king cobra under its spell. With his tongue leading the way, he may spend days trying to find the female. The female, however, is wary of the larger male. He could easily eat her if he wanted to. But the scent of the female king cobra has put the male in a specific mode - that of mating. If he is rejected by a defensive female, he will try cajoling her. His style of persuasion might seem ridiculous to us - he butts the female with his head. If she does not relent, he may butt her so violently that she is lifted off the ground. Eventually, after all this attention, the female relents. Her hood spread, head raised slightly off the ground, she glides gracefully away with the eager male crawling over her, trying to get her tail up. This is important because without her co-operation a male cannot effectively mate. Once he has her tail up, he mates with her and they may remain in this embrace for an hour. After that the male goes his way - to meet other females or ...males.

The breeding season also makes male king cobras touchy towards each other. When two adult male king cobras meet, they may engage in a strange dance called 'male combat'. This is what is mistaken for a 'mating dance'. The combat is ritualised like in a judo match - no biting is allowed and the rivals are honest enough to follow the rules without an umpire! The snakes rise up as high as four feet off the ground, twine around each other and attempt to push the other down. The first to pin the opponent's body down to the ground is the winner and they will joust until one prevails. It's not clear why snakes perform this combat dance ritual. It may be over food, territory, females or just excessive hormones working overtime during the breeding period. The struggle can last for hours and the snakes become oblivious to anything else - come rain, shine or even man.

Injurious to health!

What do you do when a snake is really, really close and headed your way? Usually the best thing would be to stand as still as a tree and hope that the snake goes on its way. Most snakes do not have good eyesight. With king cobras, the rule is to retire gracefully and if you can't do that, RUN as fast as you can.

The king cobra comes with a warning - its bite is injurious to health. It has enormous venom glands in its "cheeks" but surprisingly, its venom is less toxic than a common cobra's. However, the sheer quantity of venom a king cobra can inject still makes it lethal. It can inject upto 6 ml. of venom at a time - that's a couple of thimbles full. There's an old anecdotal note from Burma that even talks of an elephant dying from a king cobra's bite. The last known instance of a human succumbing to a king cobra bite in India was 20 years ago when a woman stepped on a king cobra in a tea garden in the Annamalai Hills of Tamil Nadu. But the king cobra's instinctive response to humans is to flee. Even nesting king cobras who have a reputation for aggression are shy of facing humans.

A bird or a snake?

The female king cobra is different from any other snake in the world because she actually builds a nest for her eggs. Consider this, here is a creature with no limbs that painstakingly scrapes together a pile of leaves to lay her eggs in. This amazing event occurs at the threshold of the monsoon. When her time comes, the female king cobra gets very restless and climbs nervously over the surrounding vegetation probably to choose the right site for her nest. Once a place is selected, she loosens the leaf litter by shoving her head under the leaves and pushing them up, thoroughly raking the area. Then she coils around a bunch of leaves and literally carries it in a coil of her body to her nest site. She repeats this many times until she has the base of her nest piled up. She lays her 20-30 eggs on this and then piles more leaves on top of her eggs. The dimensions of the finished nest is about 40 cm high and about a metre in diameter. The whole operation can last twelve hours. Job done, you'd think the exhausted female king cobra would just leave - to rest and find food. But no, a more serious job is just ahead. She will stand guard without eating for the two months it takes for the eggs to hatch. The most she will get is a drink of water when it rains. Her mere presence is enough to dissuade any intruder. If that doesn't work, she will put on a formidable display - hood spread, mouth open and will growl like a dog. That is enough to send even the most persistent intruder off. This behaviour is what gives rise to stories of aggressive king cobras.

Little wonders

When the monsoon catches on seriously, the deluge can batter the nest down to almost nothing. But as long as the centre of the nest is dry with just the right amount of humidity, the eggs are fine. The babies arrive towards the end of the rains when there are plenty of other baby snakes around on which they can feed. They are born with perfect miniature fangs capable of injecting venom but they are so tiny that they can barely penetrate our skin. The thin hungry mother finally leaves them to find food. It is probably just as well because she's a snake eater herself. Left on their own now, most of the baby king cobras will be taken as prey by civets, birds, monitor lizards and other snakes. Only one or two will make it to adulthood.

Deadly mystique

Rising up over its victim, the king cobra strikes down on any part of the body and clamps its jaws in a suffocating grip. It chews on the snake, injecting more venom with every bite until the victim stops struggling. The venom attacks the nervous system so first the lungs collapse, the heart stops beating, the muscles go limp with paralysis and the victim suffocates. Then the king cobra slowly works its way toward the head of the snake, moving its fangs alternately without ever letting the snake go. Once it reaches the head, it begins swallowing. Rows of teeth and the fangs move alternately all the way down the snake's body very similar to the way a sewing machine moves cloth. With the prey fully settled in its stomach the king cobra retires to a convenient place - a tree hole, burrow or a tangle of branches many feet up - for a week if it's a large meal. Every part of the snake is digested - bones, scales and all.

Being the largest venomous snake in the world makes it a formidable creature, but the mystique of the king cobra has a lot to do with its intelligence. There's something uncanny about the way a king cobra looks you in the eye. It's an indescribable feeling, an encounter with a sentient being. It's about making contact with an entity so utterly different from anything one knows and normally relates to. Keepers say that when they open the door to the king cobra cage, the snake is so perceptive of what's going on; it knows whether the keeper is planning to feed it or whether he is just checking up on it. But it is its majestic restraint that reveals its personality. For the six months it took to shoot the film, we were all in such close proximity to king cobras I marvel that no accident took place. And this is more due to the tolerance of the snake than anything else. The more closely we work with an animal, the more we take it for granted. We flaunted our own security protocol several times; each time the king cobra just warned us, mock charging but never carrying it through. This made us respect the creature more than any other.

Looking back now, four films later, 'King Cobra' was probably the most ambitious one we ever made and the risks we took seem foolhardy. The medical protocol turned out to be almost completely worthless. The Thai Red Cross Society is the only place that produces king cobra antivenom serum and we bought a stock of 30 vials from them. Since Rom was already sensitive to the horse serum from which antivenom serum is made, elaborate plans had to be made with local hospitals. We had to make sure they had ventilators and all other facilities to deal with the allergic reaction that his body might go into in case he got bitten and needed the antivenom serum. This allergic reaction called anaphylaxis could be so severe that it could kill him even if the venom did not. We rehearsed what we had to do in case any of us got bitten during the course of the filming and the protocol was fixed on everyone's door for easy reference. A year after the film was made the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine ran tests to see whether the Thai antivenom serum was effective against Indian king cobra venom - the results turned out negative. It was thanks to the restraint and intelligence of this most majestic of snakes that we are alive today to tell the tale.

Epilogue: Most people who've seen 'King Cobra' have said they empathized with a snake like they never have before. This was probably the only film made on a single snake species at that time and we hope that it furthers the cause of rainforest and reptile conservation in India. A year later, 'King Cobra' unexpectedly won an Emmy for Outstanding Program Achievement and is the most highly rated film on the National Geographic Channel in Asia.

In Search of the Mugger Crocodile

Published in Reptiles, Jan 2006

In the summer of 1999, Rom Whitaker, a herpetologist from India and I went to Sri Lanka to look at mugger crocodiles (Crocodylus palustris). Our goal was to make the ultimate film on the mugger. But first, we needed to find a place with a mother load of muggers where we would set up base. Sadly, there were no big populations of crocs anywhere on the Indian subcontinent. Rom had done a croc survey in Sri Lanka in the late 1970s and remembered seeing large congregations of crocs in Yala National Park in the southeastern corner of the island nation. So that’s where we headed.

Yala is a woodsy, dry evergreen forest by the beach. The Park is dotted with pools, ponds and lakes – every one of them man-carved. Around the 9^th century, this region was a part of the Ruhunu kingdom, a mysterious civilization of whom nothing is known. These water bodies were excavated then by hydrological engineers to water the huge rice fields. No one knows what caused this kingdom to vanish with no trace. Over the centuries, the forest reclaimed the land and today this sprawling 373,000 acres of forest is known as Yala (or Ruhunu) National Park.

When Sri Lanka became a part of the British Empire, Yala National Park was a Hunting Reserve. Up until the 1950s hunting parties of Europeans and Sri Lankans came here to shoot leopards, elephants, buffalo and boar. Nobody paid much attention to reptiles. In the records of the Park there is a lone entry to do with reptiles: on 1 Nov 1948, a party of 6 had shot 3 crocs, 4 boars and 1 python. The lack of croc references is surprising considering that crocs were everywhere and an easy target for any frustrated hunter wanting to take a pot shot. Or may be they just didn’t think it was worth writing home about!

Yala National Park: The Croc Paradise:

A lot of the waterholes had dried up at the time of our visit. There were about 10 large perennial ponds we concentrated on as all the crocs could only be here. We counted an average of 100 crocs a day during the dry season. In several ponds painted storks hunted for fish with impunity while crocs cruised close by. The birds were ever watchful but there were moments when they were too engrossed in the hunt to pay any attention to the predator close by. It took only a couple of days to fish out a pond. Then the hunters left for fishier pastures. Both birds and crocs looked very well fed and it seemed obvious that the storks and crocs had forged some kind of benign relationship. The birds’ constant probing around in the mud startled some fish right into the jaws of the waiting croc but it wasn’t clear how the deal worked for the storks. May be just the privilege of being allowed to fish in the murky waters. Elephants walked past basking crocs to drink water while buffaloes wallowed in the mud under the seemingly sleepy gaze of the reptiles. Deer were more wary of the tourists than the immobile crocs.

If a croc could stake its territory in a perennial pool, he had nothing to worry about. Others however have to slog – digging deep subterranean bunkers to hang out in. A tracker pointed to a croc tunnel at the edge of a bone-dry pool. A well-worn path led into the tunnel. And what was more - there were old broken eggshells lying around. Where were the babies? How could they survive the summer? The tracker said he had seen the babies come out of the tunnel following their mother every evening as she walked about 500 feet to the nearest water – a saline lagoon. Rom doubted the story but there seemed no other possible way for the babies to survive. This also provided a clue to where the mother crocs were nesting. Rom checked the mouth of every tunnel for a nest. He found 2 nests with about 30 eggs in each which he estimated had been laid a month earlier. The first eggs to be laid would hatch smack in the middle of the dry season like those phantom babies that take a walk with their mother every evening. What would they eat? What about freshwater to drink? This wasn’t making any sense.

All 3 nests were on the banks of saline lagoons. This may be because that is where the big female crocs congregate in the nesting season. We tested water samples from a couple of lagoons for salinity. The laboratory reported that the water was more saline than seawater, with the strong admonition: “remove crocodiles immediately”! Rom thought the young ones had little chance of survival in the very salty water. They were doomed year after year; we never saw any of the previous year's young. (We never found any nests along the river banks nor did we get a chance to probe around many of the freshwater ponds.)

Although the landscape of Yala is flat, a few rocky outcrops stick up. Rainwater collects in pools in the rocks and some of them are deep enough to be perennial. There were croc scats around but if there were any crocs, they made themselves scarce. It must take a determined croc to climb up the steep rocky incline several feet above the forest. Below one such pool we spotted a bleached perfectly preserved skeleton of a 9-foot mugger croc, probably the victim of a bad summer. Close by, at the bottom of one dry pool up in the rocks, were bones of buffalo and croc – a deadly trap with its smooth slippery sides. Once you get in, you can’t get out!

We had to regularly jam on the brakes to allow star tortoises (Geochelone elegans) to cross the road – both on the highways outside the Park and the dirt roads inside the Park. Big rugged females hotly pursued by smaller males; babies no bigger than a hen’s egg! Locals told us that the tortoises were the scourge of their tomato fields and the only way to combat the slow moving “pest” was to dig a trench. Apparently the tortoises fall in and die, unable to get out.

One afternoon while we were driving through the Park a message reached us that the Army wanted Rom to come immediately to the check post. The Army is a constant presence ever since they wrested control of the Park from armed rebels who chased away or killed the Wildlife staff a decade ago. Caught in the rafters above the security guard’s bed was a beautiful cobra (Naja naja). The soldiers, toting semi-automatic weapons, stood nervously by as Rom climbed up to the rafters and with a snake hook coaxed the cobra out of its hideout. What to do next? He couldn’t climb down and he didn’t know what to do with the snake. A quandary the snake solved by diving onto the bed below. Immediately the soldiers scurried out of the room. The cobra, stunned by the fall, conveniently waited until Rom could get it into a snake bag. Later in the evening, it was released into the dry forest several miles away from the check post.

Digging burrows is just one of the two ways the crocs deal with the dry summer. A lot of the crocs hike overland, across the jungle, along pathways they have probably used for several years, to deeper ponds. With the kind permission of the Wildlife Department, we walked along the dry riverbed of the Menik Ganga (with armed guards in case of an elephant or buffalo attack!) and there were croc tracks everywhere on the sand. A major nocturnal migration was happening unseen.

Lunugumvehera National Park: Croc at the end of the tunnel:

Almost contiguous with Yala to the North is Lunugumvehera National Park. It receives far less attention from tourists and the wildlife authorities than it deserves. Seasonal farms have come up along the riverbanks, irrigated by water lifted from the river. The river that runs through the Park is dammed and thus dry in summer so the farmers had gone home. They return only when the rains came and the river began to flow again. The embankments, we discovered, were riddled with big holes -- croc tunnels! A rotting corpse of a seven-foot croc with a stick driven into its skull lay by one of the tunnels. Not a good sign for croc conservation!

Rom devised a method of using long lengths of plastic pipes to measure the depth of the croc tunnels. Put together, the pipes measured 35 feet, but the tunnels were sometimes even longer! Most of these deep tunnels would have been worked on year after year by the resident croc. Rom was also curious about the temperature inside the tunnels and chose to crawl into the largest ones to find out! The burrows were clean and dry inside and several degrees cooler than the outside. I was worried that an agitated croc would charge out, but figured Rom's nose was large enough to handle the confrontation!

As it turns out, some of the tunnels were quite short and while rounding a bend, Rom did indeed come upon the resident croc or two that were just as surprised to see him. But none of the crocs did much more than hiss.

After checking out a fair number of tunnels, Rom wondered if the crocs in tunnels are in metabolic depression (a phenomenon seen in other reptiles that aestivate) – the crocs drop their heart rate to a minimum, reduce their breathing frequency and slow down all bodily functions. By entering a form of deep sleep-like state, they are able to tide over months of inhospitable dry season with no food and no water. When encountered deep inside their tunnels, they re-gained animation enough only to hiss; but couldn’t charge. Measuring metabolic depression is tricky business. By the time you rig the croc with all the probes and electrodes needed to measure their heart beat, brain reaction time, breathing frequency, the croc wakens completely. So, while we can guess and suspect that this is what is taking place, we have yet to quantify and prove it.

One croc, however, wasn’t in metabolic depression. When Rom stuck his head inside the tunnel to see if anyone was home, she came out leaping and hissing, missing his head by inches. Rom nearly tripped trying to put a safe distance between the croc and him. We discovered a nest of eggs at the mouth of her tunnel the next day, obviously the reason why she was awake and alert.

Village crocs:

If you thought “ugly” reptilian predators could only survive in Sri Lanka’s National Parks, you’re wrong. As we were. Local friends hesitantly told us of crocs in the neighboring village canal. Rom jumped up exclaiming “Show me!” Our friend, Shantha, led the way across the rice fields. A tiny copse of coconut trees standing out among the vast plain of rice was where we were headed. As we came closer, we could the see the canal, cutting a swathe through the fields. The copse was totally tangled in thorny vines; access inside was going to be difficult. We were seeking a way in and came upon a freshly dug up croc nest. An egg predator, probably a monitor lizard (Varanus bengalensis), had found the nest and worked its way through the gooey contents; the egg shells untidily strewn all over the area. So crocs were there all right. As we came right around the corner we saw the tunnels, about 10 of them, side by side. The Irrigation Department was de-silting the canal and so it was bone dry. We could only assume that the crocs survived on the fish that came washing down with the water when the sluice gates upstream were opened. Rats that thrived on the rice could be dietary supplements. If crocs didn’t get in the way of humans, they could survive just about anywhere in seemed.

The head of a croc was resting at the mouth of one tunnel. It was in trouble. While desilting the canal, the maintenance crew had also widened it, shaving the croc’s tunnel down. It could barely pull its head in and after seeing two dead crocs inside a National Park, we feared for its life.

Discussions with the Wildlife Department followed and permission was given to translocate the croc. A week later, we arrived with the local Wildlife officials and the entire village to move the croc to its new home. Rom slipped a noose around its neck and before hauling it out, warned all the spectators to watch out – the croc could roll, snap and charge. The croc came out as meek as a tame pussycat. It was in metabolic depression! With enthusiastic Wildlife staff helping, Rom tied its jaws with elastic and loaded it onto the back of a pickup. It was released in one of the perennial lakes 45 minutes away, in Yala National Park. It was an hour and half before the croc gradually came to and could walk to the water.

Katagamuwa: The Lake of Crocs:

We were repeatedly told to visit a place called Katagamuwa. Everyone insisted that there were hundreds of crocodiles there. Finally, we shook off our cynicism and made the trip. Sure enough, Katagamuwa Lake had shrunk to that critical size. Any bigger, it would have been impossible to see the crocs; any smaller and they'd have all left for deeper waters. What we saw truly staggered us: Great big mugger crocs merrily fishing for hefty snakehead fish and catfish. It was dawn and the early morning light filtered through the trees, turning the crocs' hides yellowish gold. When the sun came up a bit stronger, these hulks hauled themselves out onto the banks like Europeans sunbathing side by side, soaking up the heat. We counted about 150 big crocs (left out the small ones) in the primeval splendour of the morning light. This was perfect.

From way before dawn, we could hear mugger hunting for fish, frogs and even an occasional stork - splash, crunch, gulp, gulp, gulp. A rosy sliver of sunlight finally tiptoed onto the scene. The bungalow was built conveniently close to the lake where I hung out. Rom, being the intrepid croc man, was ensconced behind a bush near the lake, spying on the crocs. It seemed as if the crocs were hunting systematically, in a group, much the way otters, orcas (killer whales) and dolphins do. The whole bunch of crocs would drive fish from one end of the water body to the other and then launch into them. Then the process would be repeated, across to the other shore: a synchronous smorgasbord. Rom wouldn't give them the benefit of cleverness though; he still maintains that the coordination of the hunt was coincidence. If one croc grabs a fish and creates a splash, the others will come over to investigate whether food is on offer. Then, more splashes follow that attract still more crocs and so on until the entire gang of crocs sail up and down the length of the lake in serendipitous coordination.

Crocs are as much creatures of habit as they are opportunists. By 9 o'clock the crocs were done for the morning and chose to spend a couple of hours basking, the sun revving their body engines to digest the huge meal they had had on a cool stomach. When it got too hot, they lazed in the water, playing politics. If a subordinate showed too much brashness, he had to be cut down to size; if a rival tried to usurp the top croc's place in the hierarchy he had to be trounced. The crocs had another big meal at dusk. They were so in tune with the time of day, that you could set your watch by them. Well, give or take a few minutes!

Through the day there were other creatures to watch. My inventory of animals that visited the lake to drink included: a pair of jackals with two pups, too many peacocks and peahens to count, wild buffalo, spotted deer, gray langurs, toque macaques and a ruddy mongoose – Rom collectively refers to them as “croc food”. And all the while, a pair of fishing eagles surveyed the scene from above. At night a small herd of elephants showed up for a drink causing Rom to come scurrying to the safety of the bungalow.

In all the time we were in Yala we were bound by Park restrictions. The one that we chaffed at the most was the one that demanded that we not step out of our vehicles. Those rules didn't apply to Katagamuwa Lake, as it wasn't a part of Yala at all. It formed the centerpiece of Katagamuwa Wildlife Sanctuary. Every morning we woke up to find signs of wild animals all around the bungalow. An elephant had come within 50 yards of us as we slept in a line of beds on the veranda of the bungalow, dorm-style, lulled to sleep by the buzzing of tree crickets punctuated by an occasional leopard call. We later met a scarred ranger who was dragged off a similar bungalow veranda by a leopard and lived to tell the tale.

Katagamuwa was a good summer bonanza for the crocs, but the water could not have lasted more than a fortnight. All those 150 crocs would then have to hightail it to the river about a mile away. We couldn’t wait around to see this happen and were forever haunted by visions of a long croc migration through the forest. But that will have to wait until a research project that we’re working hard to set up gets going. Until then, Lanka’s mugger crocs will have to wait!

Our survey of crocodiles in southern Sri Lanka lightened our hearts at the prospects of the mugger’s survival. There is no place on the entire Indian subcontinent that supports crocodiles in such numbers as in the tiny island nation of Sri Lanka. We think that it is the special brand of Buddhism practiced here that lends an aura of protection to all things, and the dangerous and scaly need it more than anyone else. In this short time we’ve seen more snakes and lizards walking and slithering through people’s backyards than in all the time we’ve spent in India. And these are “creepy crawlies,” mind you. Enhancing an already strong religious sanctity for all life with conservation education will go a long way to securing the mugger crocodiles’ future.