World Wild Vet Page 9

  A huge green iguana stared back at me. He’d backed himself into the corner by the motor and was puffing up and whipping his tail, clearly and completely freaked out. I have no doubt he was at least as upset as the fisherman, who appeared afraid to get any closer.

  Sure as the sun was shining and baby sea turtles crawl to the sea at night, this was a job for … me.

  “Necesitas ayuda?” I asked. You need help?

  The fisherman nodded.

  The iguana was about two feet long from snout to vent (not counting his tail). He had three potential weapons at his disposal: his fine-pointed claws (the better to climb trees with), his small, razor-sharp teeth (designed for shredding vegetation), and the fast-swinging, spiked tail he’d use as a whip if he decided to mix it up with a fellow iguana. As if he knew I was measuring him up, he fanned out his dewlap—the broad flap of skin between his chin and neck—seven or eight inches, trying to look bigger.

  I took a step closer, speaking calmly: “It’s okay, man. I’m not gonna hurt you, but you can’t stay here.” I had a pet iguana named Pete when I was growing up, so I had a soft spot for this frustrated and defensive big guy; even so, there was no way I could explain to him that I wasn’t going to hurt him, or that I was positive he’d be happier out of the boat than in it.

  I stepped down into the rocking hull and waited for it to stop swaying from the distribution of my weight. Not-Pete didn’t like that much, looking right at me, opening his mouth, and letting out a hiss. I wouldn’t if I were you!

  By that time there were a dozen people around the dock, waiting to watch this iguana bite the hell out of me. I’d been handling lizards all my life, but I didn’t usually have an audience or a rocking boat to up the stakes. The biggest challenge of this job, though, was the fact that the animal was trapped. Cornering animals makes them significantly more stressed and aggressive. It’s not their fault. When they only have one direction to go—toward you—there are not a lot of peaceful options at their disposal.

  Standing in that boat, I felt protective of the roaming iguana who’d found himself in such a crappy situation and eager to show the small crowd watching that it could be handled peaceably. It seemed like an excellent opportunity to do what I’d been trying to do with my videos for years: educate a group of people about the nature of a wild animal. I saw myself as something of an aspiring Steve Irwin out there—one who had a dozen-strong live audience instead of millions of people glued to their TVs. The whole thing was exhilarating, a reaffirmation of why I’d chosen this path of wildlife education in the first place.

  It was time to help my angry green friend out of his crisis. I made my move, covering the distance between me and the panicked iguana in one long stride and waving my left hand directly in his face. His head followed the hand, and while he was watching it, I used my right arm to reach around, grasp him behind the neck, and scoop him up. He landed a couple good scratches before I got him under control, but it was a pretty quick, clean grab.

  As I hopped up onto the dock, the crowd erupted in a cheer. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to talk about the species for a minute. I’d been doing this with every creature I encountered across Central and South America in front of a camera, and now I had a live audience. In my broken Spanish I basically said something like “Behold the green iguana. He doesn’t want to hurt you. He likes fruit.” It was, perhaps, not my finest narration, but the crowd smiled politely and even took pictures. As soon as my impromptu pro-iguana PSA was finished, I set my snippy new pal on the sand away from the dock, close to the trees. He was quick to scrabble away from the loitering crowd and find a new, less-contested place to hang out.

  I still have a picture of me holding him, a huge grin on my face and blood trickling down my arms.

  It was a good day all around.

  Christmas in July

  Costa Rica is home to an amazing variety of snake species, and I was able to get up close and personal with what I considered the ultimate quartet of South American species: the fer-de-lance, the eyelash viper, the bushmaster, and the jumping pit viper, whose video would become my calling card with snake wranglers all over the world.

  In general, pit vipers are ambush predators, able to stay motionless for as long as it takes for prey to come to them. Not all snakes are like this. Cobras and mambas, for example, are “roving” predators—meaning they actively move to seek out potential prey. If you don’t have good jungle vision, you can walk by the same ambush-predator snake a dozen times without seeing it. Your eyes just scroll on past. So everywhere I went, I scoured the ground and the trees, looking for a telltale difference in shape or a pop of color that didn’t belong. Each time my eye detected an anomaly, my heart started pounding. Is that it?

  And then one afternoon as I wandered through an area of heavy rain forest, it was. The fer-de-lance. It was camouflaged in a pile of leaves and dirt, but the X pattern down its back snagged my eye. Normally I’d go straight after a snake I was so excited to meet, but this species has a serious reputation. The fer-de-lance is a predator with attitude. Even when it’s young and small (long before reaching a mature length of over seven feet), it’s known for being one angry little dude with a fiercely hot venom. Nearly half of all venomous snake bites in Costa Rica are delivered by this species, and those bites can be devastating—causing permanent damage, amputation, or even death.

  So even though I wanted very much to touch the snake in front of me, I knew doing so would be a calculated risk.

  The more menacing and angry something looks, the more it fascinates me, and this badass little two-foot snake had all the markers. First and foremost, she had a diamond-shaped head—the better to accommodate her venom glands. Up close, I knew her eyes would look fearsome, with narrow vertical-slit pupils—a telltale sign of a predator who hunts at night. And one of the features I love most about pit vipers is their prominent upper eyelid ridge. It’s a beautiful structure, and it’s also a statement because it makes them look pissed off twenty-four/seven.

  Deadly or not, the snake was a beauty, and I was going to film her. Nobody was going to tell me no. This would be my first wild-caught pit viper in Central America.

  But I didn’t have enough light to shoot. In order to make this happen, I was going to have to move an extremely dangerous snake to a better location (and then bring her back to her home). I looked at the few supplies I had and hatched a plan.

  Moving as stealthily as I could, I got out my snake hook and eased close. I slipped it under the snake and received a halfhearted snap of the jaw in return. Once she was on the hook, I dropped my rain jacket to the ground and propped open the pocket. Then I swung the hook to the jacket and directed her into the cave of the pocket. Knowing that the next moment was the one in which I was mostly likely to get bit—and that I’d be mortified if I had to tell people for the rest of my life that I got bit by a deadly snake while I was putting it in my pocket—I laid the hook across the seam on the same side of the pocket’s zipper, and my hiking boot (which I was still wearing) alongside that. I tilted the thick rubber sole of the boot toward the snake, giving her a big, safe target if she decided to strike. This step was absolutely critical, because these snakes are basically built to strike in exactly the conditions I’d created—her coiled up in a dark, safe place; me putting my hand (which she would effortlessly detect and locate with the heat-sensing pit organs in her face) up to it. The material of my jacket would never stop a strike, so the boot was my insurance. Finally, I reached out and closed the zipper. The jacket material was light enough for me to make out the snake’s silhouette, and she immediately curled up and lay still. I lifted the jacket by the collar and started walking out of the shadows and into the fading daylight.

  It was now or never. I set up my camera and then reversed the whole process, blocking the pocket with my hook and boot, unzipping, coaxing the snake out with the hook. As soon as she was fully visible, I gently pinned her with the hook. (Yes, gently! Like many snakes, this one was almos
t as delicate as she was lethal, and she required appropriately careful handling.) I reached down and gripped her behind the head with one hand and at her tail with the other. Finally I lifted her high enough to get both of us in the shot. At first, I was so excited to be holding this snake, I kind of forgot to say anything for the camera. I wanted to see her eyes, her mouth, feel the rough scales on her head. This was a big moment for me, and the snake was doing all I could hope for: tolerating it.

  Finally I remembered to narrate, explaining that we want to regard any pit viper with lots of respect. Even as I was saying the words, the snake opened her mouth nearly 180 degrees and snapped it shut. The bulk of her body was lax, but the jaws were working and the tip of the tail was twitching fast, a reminder to not get complacent. I pointed out the small pits in her face and explained that this amazing adaptation allows the snake to sense infrared radiation coming off warm bodies, even from a few feet away. So when this snake is lying in wait for her next meal, she can calibrate the size and distance of the prey—a creature that usually never even sees the strike coming.

  As soon as I was finished taping, I transferred the fer-de-lance back into my jacket pocket again for safekeeping, then returned her to exactly where I’d found her.

  * * *

  I spent a couple days near the town of Limón, and one morning a young Scandinavian tourist asked my guide if she could come scouting for snakes with us. The three of us headed out, walking through a protected section of jungle. The two of them were out in front, with me lagging behind, when my eye jumped to a color combination on a low gray-brown tree branch. Red and green, bright and bold. I leaned closer and felt all the joy of a kid at Christmas—it was an eyelash viper. This was the most colorful venomous snake I’d ever seen in the wild. And not only was it colorful, it was wildly unusual. These distinctive snakes have a modification that makes them stand out even among the weirdest and most wonderful wildlife: they have two or three scales above their eyes that have evolved to spike up. From a distance, it looks like they have huge winking eyelashes. It’s not hair, but the effect is the same: Is this snake flirting with me?

  I knew I had to move fast—I did not want to miss my chance to interact with this beauty. She was only about eighteen inches long, and as my companions realized that I had stopped and came back to watch, I extended my snake hook her way, easing it under her so that she slowly transitioned her weight from tree to hook. As long as she felt securely supported, she didn’t seem to care if the “branch” beneath her was wood or metal.

  Since she was staying with me by choice and I didn’t have any grip on her, I wanted to get a couple pics right away. Balancing the snake hook in one hand and not breaking my focus on the snake, I pulled my digital camera up and took a few shots. Then I placed her on the ground, gently pinned her head, and lifted her up for a short video. I was careful not to keep her for very long or manipulate her more than the minimum necessary. The way I saw it then (and still do) is that if I could respectfully handle this wild animal long enough to capture something educational about her, the low level of stress she experienced could potentially help protect the rest of her species in the wild. By coping with a small amount of hassle, this snake helped me explain and promote her kind. While my guide filmed us, she never showed an ounce of temper or hostility. She was a beauty inside and out.

  Mutual Respect

  My guide took me to a serpentarium in Limón where he knew the owner, so that I could get an up-close look at several species of indigenous snakes that I was unlikely to find in the wild. The owner was captivating to talk to, telling us about his animals, how he’d come to have them (many brought to the facility after being confiscated from the illegal pet trade), and tidbits about their personalities and behaviors. He had the most amazing jumping pit viper. These are really thick-bodied snakes with slow locomotion but a crazy-fast strike—so fast and so enthusiastic that they sometimes lift themselves right off the ground, thereby earning their name. They’re über ambush predators.

  I wanted to hold that snake in the worst way, but the owner wasn’t about to just hand me a hook and say, “Go for it, kid.” You can’t just let some tourist come in off the street and handle a potentially lethal venomous snake because he asks for it.

  I decided to make my case, starting with showing him that I was traveling with my own snake hook. He nodded. “Sí, sí.” Then I pulled out a picture of me working with a rattlesnake in Colorado. His eyes widened a bit, and he nodded again. “Bueno.” Then I told him about the fer-de-lance and pulled up a picture on my camera. “Esta semana,” I said. This week. I could tell he was softening up. He looked from me to the enclosures and seemed to have an idea.

  “Try this,” he said, leading me to a yellow rat snake coiled on a pile of brush. Rat snakes aren’t venomous, so they’re harmless, but they’re also aggressive. As I accepted the challenge and moved in the snake’s direction, he reared up and bobbed his head at me to let me know he wasn’t in the mood. I said, “Easy, big guy,” gently hooked him, and lifted him with both hands. He wrapped around my arm nicely enough, but then he whipped around and bit me on the hand. Depending on who was judging, that moment might have been interpreted as an indication that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. After all, I got bit.

  The serpentarium owner saw it differently. He knew that this was an especially grumpy snake; he hadn’t wanted to see if it would bite so much as how I would handle it if it did.

  The strike didn’t hurt. Most bites from small, nonvenomous snakes aren’t very painful, but they can come as a shock to people who aren’t comfortable or experienced handlers. If you want to work with snakes, though, you have to be able to stay calm, even when things are going a little haywire. Panic breeds carelessness—and sometimes it’s catching. The fact that I didn’t spaz out—or even flinch—seemed to win the owner over. He actually shook my hand, a sign of mutual respect. Then this guy who was probably thirty years older than me, a true expert and the keeper of a stunning collection of snakes, patted me on the back and told me I could go ahead and interact with any of the snakes I wanted.

  I knew exactly which one I wanted. I went straight to the jumping pit viper. This snake was about two and a half feet long, not much longer than the fer-de-lance—but his body was about twenty times as thick. Actually, it was thicker than my wrist. Just. Huge. He had a head to match, ridiculously wide, indicating XXL venom glands. If this snake were a man, he’d be about five feet tall and 250 pounds, solid muscle from head to toe. He’d have a Mohawk and he’d be wearing a spiked collar, and every single thing about his appearance would say, Do Not Cross Me.

  Man, I could not wait to get my hands on him. The video we were about to make together remains one of my all-time favorites. Given the green light (and knowing this guy was well fed and looking a little sedentary), I used the hook to stabilize the snake. Unlike the fer-de-lance, this was a snake of significant strength. I had to hold him with a strong hand or I could end up getting bit. His body felt heavy in my grasp, and his lethargy disappeared as I gripped him behind his head. He opened his massive jaw—nearly as big as my palm—and exposed a mouthful of some of the largest fangs I’d ever seen in my hands up to that point. These were giant, curved, monster fangs, wide as a fingernail, capable of puncturing anything and—like massive hypodermic needles—injecting it full of deadly venom.

  With the camera rolling, I gripped that head with one hand and brought the long handle of my snake hook close to him, on the hunch that he was pissed off enough to bite into nearly anything. His mouth snapped closed over the handle and—while I watched and the camera kept recording—his fangs poured venom.

  Just. Freaking. Awesome. Even as an enthusiast, even as a guy with pet snakes, even as a veterinarian, I might have gone my whole life without seeing venom flowing freely like that. It was magic.

  * * *

  Back in my room, I put together a handful of short videos and a few photo highlights of my trip so far and e-mailed them to a pro
ducer, a friend of a friend. Until that day, I’d been recording to have a catalog of experiences I could share on Facebook and YouTube. In the back of my mind, though, I was always thinking they might one day find a bigger audience, maybe catch the eye of a producer or a network that would provide me with a support system to go more places and see more animals. I didn’t know if my e-mail would lead to anything, but every time I got in front of a camera with a new animal, I felt like I might be doing something valuable, encouraging a little more understanding and a little more respect for the amazing creatures I was meeting.

  An Irresistible Croc

  My girlfriend flew out to meet me in Costa Rica, and we spent one of our first days hiking and then taking a three-hour drive along the Pacific coast to our hotel. When we arrived in the early evening, she decided to grab a nap, but I wanted to scope out the area while there was still some daylight. That night I was planning to look for crocs, and I needed to know where I’d have the best odds of seeing them without a crowd hanging around.

  If you travel in Costa Rica and want to take your best shot at a guaranteed croc sighting, you don’t have to look any farther than the main bridge over the Tárcoles River. Locals call it puente de cocodrilo—crocodile bridge. The muddy shoreline underneath has become a popular gathering place for crocs, and on any given day you’re likely to see at least a few—and sometimes dozens—of these behemoths lazing in the water. Why the migration to that one spot? Mostly because people feed them there. It’s become such a sure thing that vendors sometimes set up stands to sell souvenirs.

  The American crocodiles in Costa Rica are massive—often measuring fifteen feet long and weighing in at over five hundred pounds. They’re bigger and toothier (some teeth show even when their mouths are closed) than their alligator cousins. They’re also meaner, going after anything and anyone who encroaches on their territory. These are apex predators with no natural enemies, and they will attempt to eat anything they damn well want—including large livestock, sharks, and even humans. There have been a bunch of documented cases of these crocs attacking people. Unlike alligators, which usually stick to fresh and brackish water, crocs are totally at home in salt water, and they occasionally meander up among waders and bathers at popular beaches and stop a few hearts.