Alvares, Rahul; Natural history -- India -- Anecdotes
In the mornings, I helped the workers clean the croc pits, a task which
I thoroughly enjoyed. We would jump into the pits with big sticks and
chase all the crocs into the water. Then we would clean out the croc
shit and the left overs of their food which included a lot of bones.
This exercise was usually done with a male worker first chasing the
crocs into the water. Then the remaining 3 to 4 women would help with
brooms, baskets and spades. Occasionally, we would have a crocodile
wanting us to get out of his pit instead. No matter how hard you hit
him on his nose he would chase you around until he would finally give
in, so to speak, and dash into the water with a big splash or
sometimes, glide gracefully to where he could join his friends who
sometimes numbered a thousand! (The Croc Bank had around seven thousand
crocs at the time I was there.)
I also had occasion to participate a few times in the operations
involved in shifting crocodiles from one location to another. That was
quite an adventure in itself!
One day Rom and Harry decided to shift the largest male Gharial in the
Croc Bank from one pit to another as it had broken its upper jaw in a
fight with another male during the previous breeding season.
Normally you try to catch a croc by throwing a sort of a small anchor
in and when the croc latches on to it you try and pull it out. Once it
is out, about 10-15 people quickly jump and sit on it. (That's the only
way to prevent a croc from getting back into water!). With its mouth
bound by rubber bands, the croc is then rolled onto a ladder, bound to
it, lifted and carried to the pit that it has to be transferred to. An
average adult croc is about 250 kg and about two to three metres long.
It takes 15-20 people to carry it.
Once it is released in the pool the ropes and rubber bands are removed
and the last unfortunate or brave man, depending on how you look at it,
makes a run for his life over the edge of the pond onto the safety of
dry land.
As we were transferring the male Gharial into a female mugger pit,
Harry jokingly yelled: "What do you think we will get-a Ghammer?" Of
course crocs only mate with others of their own species and there is no
way a Gharial and mugger will get together. We were in fact
transferring the male here in order to give it a period of rest and
recovery from fighting with other males.
Another time the exercise was because `Jaws III' needed female company.
Jaws III is the biggest captive salt water crocodile in India. He is
about 16 feet and ranks may be, 3rd or 4th in the world in terms of his
length. Therefore, after Part II of `The Great White Man-eating Shark'
was produced, called Jaws II, the Croc Bank rightly decided to name its
crocodile `Jaws III'.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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