El Bosque de la Primavera, the protected forest located just west of Guadalajara, is famed for its variety of flora and fauna – it houses 961 kinds of plants and 200 species of invertebrates.
But when Primavera rangers heard rumors that a crocodile had been spotted somewhere among the park’s 30,500 hectares of hills and canyons, they assumed their informants had probably seen a turtle and with a bit of imagination – or a bottle of tequila – had turned it into one of those large reptiles normally seen near the Pacific coast.
One day, however, a ranger visiting El Carrizo Dam, which has a small lagoon, got a good look at the crocodile and confirmed its existence.
The park staff then contacted herpetologist Paulino Ponce Campos of Jocotepec, who specializes in capturing crocodiles and alligators. Ponce has traveled all over Mexico trapping these creatures for the government or for anyone troubled by an unwanted croc on their property.
On April 28, a team of would-be crocodile wranglers headed for El Carrizo. The team included Ponce, Andres Gonzalez, director of the Center for Wildlife Conservation and Investigation; park staff Gerardo Cabrera and Karina Aguilar and U.S. Peace Corps volunteer Marc Trinks. The team had a flat-bottomed boat with a trolling motor, nets, snare traps and headlamps for night-time crocodile hunting.
At first, they simply watched the crocodile, observing its movements and favorite haunts. The reptile appeared to be nearly two meters in length and had probably been feeding on turtles and tilapia for some time.
Trinks describes the first night they floated into the middle of the pond to confront the crocodile: “We had a long pole with a noose at the end. Paulino was in the front of the boat and I was in the back, navigating. We tried to approach the croc fast, kill the motor and coast up to him so Paulino could get him around the neck with the noose. We tried that three times that night until he got scared and wouldn’t let us get close to him anymore. And then the second night we tried the same thing a few times and the croc went back in the creek where the pond starts and we corralled him there. We used nets to try to catch him. He got tangled up in one of them but when we moved in close to grab him, he swam under the nets and escaped. So that was night two lost.”
The crocodile hunters were not discouraged. The following morning they were back in the pond laying out snare traps baited with pieces of fresh fish. These snares are tripped when the crocodile eats the bait and pulls on it, causing the snare to close around the animal’s neck or body.
“The croc fell into the trap and we got him in the afternoon on day three,” Trinks says.
Biologist Karina Aguilar examined the animal and determined it was a male American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus), four years old and 1.74 meters long (5.7 feet). “He was in good shape but a bit thin, possibly due to a scarcity of food in the area,” she says.
According to Aguilar, the owner of the property and other informants told officials that the croc had suddenly appeared in the pond a few months earlier, suggesting that the animal had been deliberately placed there by “someone ignorant of how much damage such an action could cause not only to the animal, but also to the equilibrium of the local ecosystem.”
After Ponce took a sample of the crocodile’s DNA for a biogenetic data base he is working on, the crocodile was delivered to the Semarnat Wildlife and Exotic Fauna Center in El Bosque Centinela just northwest of the city. This center holds animals taken from people who are not supposed to have them and eventually sets them free in their natural ecosystems.
The celebrated Crocodile of the Primavera Forest will probably be released somewhere along the coast of Jalisco or Nayarit.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
