The India Tube - Early croc days (Part one)

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5th February 2012

Image by Suresh Chaudhari

Early croc days (Part one)

by Romulus Whitaker

In the late ‘60s wildlife conservation was just starting to become a household word in India. Reptiles, though, were still second class citizens and the word from hunters and a few naturalists was that crocodiles were almost gone.

That’s when I started looking seriously at crocodiles - all the way from Himalayan rivers like the Karnali in western Nepal down to little Kedarhalla stream in the foothills of the Nilgiris. Magical days really - shoestring budgets, public transport and a hell of a lot of footwork. Some of those early croc trips were memorable.

Tiger Tale

Once back in May 1974, during a daytime survey along the Ramganga in Corbett National Park, I sat down near a pool to get a glimpse of the mugger who had left tracks and a big scat from the night before.

Friend and Bengali babu croc surveyor, Dhruva Basu, walked upriver a little way and got comfortable on a sandbank under the shade of a sissoo tree. After a long, quiet and very still wait, when my mind was turning glassy like the water surface, my croc surfaced, an eight footer.

I got a hasty picture and just then I heard a cough and less than twenty meters from where I crouched half hidden, a large male tiger was walking up the dry river bed - TOWARD BASU! I got up in a hurry, yelled “Baaaasuuuu!” and took off after the big cat. The startled tiger gathered momentum - he'd probably never had a human chasing after him! With several big bounds the cat disappeared.

When I reached Basu he was blissfully asleep and unaware of his close encounter. The tiger's deep pugmarks in the sand were just a few feet away.

Back Biter

On another trip, this time on the Padma River near Rajshahi in Bangladesh, I was with Mohammed Ali Reza Khan, the complete naturalist. We heard that a woman had been "attacked" by a gharial and we wondered why a fish-eater would do that. We met the lady; she was gingerly sitting on a cushion and shyly explained how she got bitten on her posterior.

Squatting on the river's edge in the early morning, answering the call of nature, she heard a big splash. The next thing she knew, sharp teeth were biting into her and she was knocked over. She hastily scrambled up the riverbank, dignity damaged but luckily not too badly hurt. Looking down the bank, there was the adult gharial in the water with head out and mouth open.

Reza and I both had the same hunch and later, when we visited the site of the "attack" we located the nest that the female gharial was defending. We even saw the gharial; she swam to the bottom of the river-bank, watching us from the river as we carefully covered her nest.