Last weekend, I was in the company of hundreds of reptiles at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and Centre for Herpetology for a night safari with four of my friends, including a photographer.
The initial plan was to take any bus that goes towards Mamallapuram and get down at the nearest bus stop. Failing to get a bus for a long time, we got into a share-auto cum van that promised to take us to the Crocodile Bank.
The safari started at 7 pm. All of us were handed a torch each. It felt so adventurous manoeuvring in the dark; reminded me of Famous Five. We saw the mugger crocodiles, most commonly found in India. We held the torches upto our eye-level as the guide asked us to. And then, I shined the light inside, only to see many golden eyes stare back at me. It was simply breath-taking.
I hadn’t shaken off this surprise, when all of a sudden, we a heard a ‘pop’! There was a territorial dispute between two crocs; one pushed the other forward and closed its jaw resulting in the loud sound. As we walked ahead, a toad scurried past us and squeezed itself through a hole in the wall to the other side. “You will see quite a lot of interesting things like this.“Frogs, toads, lizards, and if you are lucky, even a snake,” said Arul CV, the zoo educator and our guide.
We moved ahead, with Arul cautioning us not to shine our torches on the next reptile. It was a Komodo dragon, a new entry from New York exchanged for 12 gharials. The world’s largest lizard can grow up to 10 feet; this one was six feet long and quite the territorial kind.
Next stop was the snakes’ abode. Here, I encountered a beautiful friendship, between a toad and a python. The toad found its way to this pythons’s cage somehow, stayed and developed a bond; “a symbiotic relationship,” says the guide. We moved in a circle meeting reptiles one after the other. Next, we encountered the gharial, an endangered crocodile species. It was about 14 feet long and quite scared of us despite its size. Understandable, given the treatment humans have given its kind for decades, killing and hunting it down.
Then it was turtle time. The spinach-loving red-crowned roof turtle is quite the player, attracting females six times bigger than its size with its bright colours during breeding season.
Moving on, we visited the female Siamese crocodile, which sat by its nest (a mound it creates using dry leaves and sand), the Nile crocodile, and more muggers near a natural pond (many golden eyes, again). We then stopped by the intelligent alligator, which responds to human calls. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in the mood that day and stayed in the water. But, he did move ahead when our guide gave the feeding call. Stumping his feet, “Bani…bah, bah…Bani, come here!” After that, we were given a cold welcome by a Tomistoma (Malayan gharial) with its mouth wide open. There was nothing to worry; it was just relaxing. I heaved a sigh of relief.
We also paid a visit to the oldest crocodile on the bank, a 65-year-old saltwater croc. The species has the hardest biting force of all animals — around 3,000 pounds per square inch. You don’t want to be anywhere around when it is in bad mood. On the other side of the Bank, we met a three-year-old sweetheart, a dwarf Caiman, barely two feet long.
Watching many other crocodiles on the way, we worked in a circle and came back to the place we started off from. Our guide thanked us all for joining. He said he hoped these visits will eventually make people care more for animals, if not already. “It is a way to connect us back to Nature.”
