by Evan Antin
Because of that, Roy and I and the production team who was traveling with me made a controversial decision. With the clock ticking before the trader’s arrival, we decided to offer the family who was holding the binturongs a reward for releasing them into Roy’s protective custody. Paying for these animals might be considered an incentive for the next poacher to come along, but in this case it was the only way to ensure the survival of three innocent orphans.
I believe it was the right call. By the time we got to them, the binturongs were huddled together in a dirty potato sack on the ground, barely moving. At first we were worried that they might already be dead. But when I opened the bag and peeked inside, three pairs of eyes blinked back at me. All three babies were alive, and when they saw the light they craned and stretched my way, trying to smell me and get a glimpse of their surroundings. I’m positive they were simply looking for their mother, and there was no way to explain to them that with her gone forever, the place they were headed was the next best thing to going home to family.
Back at the sanctuary, I held each of these infants and examined them individually. They were the size of small kittens, and they mewled and cried and gently protested the handling, wanting nothing more than to snuggle up with one another and their missing mom. It was hard not to be distracted by the ridiculous cuteness of these babies—but knowing that I had just a small window to note any potential health problems they might have, I did my best to stay focused.
With the exam out of the way and a little bit of a comfort level developing between us, they started getting playful. One of these little guys flopped over on his back with all four legs up, ready to grab. He swatted at my hands and then pulled them back toward him—a sure sign that he wanted to keep playing. And when the kits weren’t playing with me, they were rolling around with one another—wrestling and snuggling and nuzzling each other’s necks and ears, occasionally taking snack breaks to eat some of the fruit we’d put out for them. Honestly, on the cuteness scale, Pooh Bear himself had nothing on these little guys.
Roy’s plan was to raise the binturongs to maturity, breed them with his existing population, and ultimately release more bearcats onto protected lands. His commitment to strengthening the numbers of these creatures is the kind of step that may one day play a part in preserving the species.
Batting 100,000
The western coast of Palawan is home to one of the most magical national parks I’ve ever seen: the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. Aboveground, the place is gorgeous, with massive limestone columns jutting up out of the sea, clear blue water, white sand, and not a man-made structure in sight. It’s largely made up of densely lush jungle hills that feed into the tropical ocean—one of my favorite vistas on the planet. But where things get even more interesting is underground.
What you can’t see from a flyover or a boat trip past it is that Puerto Princesa contains one of the largest and most impressive cave systems on the planet, including a five-mile-long underground river that’s been named one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. The river starts on the island but ultimately empties out into the ocean, creating what’s called a mountain-to-sea ecosystem. It is incredibly rare to find everything in this ecosystem in one place: the limestone formations, old-growth forest, swamp, beach, mangrove forest, fresh water, brackish water (a mix of fresh and seawater where almost any kind of marine life-form can crop up), and a massive cave system, with chambers that are more than a football field long and more than fifty yards high. All those natural elements combine to create a home for hundreds of animals and plants you’d be challenged to find living together almost anywhere else. This place is so special that scientists continue to find new species here—including a new spider and a new fly in 2018, and three new plants in 2015.
I went into the cave system in an outrigger canoe with an expert guide, Nevong Puna, a local wildlife biologist. Gliding into the cave’s entry, there’s only one species your senses take note of on that first impression: bats. You can hear them, see them, smell the ammonia-tinged scent of their excrement. As we passed into the cave’s first big opening, we saw a few fluttering overhead. As we got deeper into the cave, their numbers increased. Finally, in a big, dark section of cavern, I shined my light overhead and realized there were not a few, not hundreds, but thousands of bats clinging to the ceiling above us. Nevong told me that more than one hundred thousand bats had been recorded in that area alone. At least eight different species of these creatures live in Puerto Princesa park, making their homes throughout the cave system. If you’re afraid of bats, this is not the place for you. But if you’re like me and find these flying mammals fascinating, it’s incredible. It’s also the reason most visitors to this area wear hard hats on their tours, and why most guides offer one major rule of cave exploration: Close your mouth when you look up! I decided to take my chances without a hat since I’m used to getting animal crap on me as part of a normal day’s work. I was much more interested in maintaining good exposure for my headlamp than I was in keeping my hair clean.
Even with the rustling of the bats, the cave—like nearly every cave I’ve ever been in—had a uniquely quiet, solemn aura. This is the kind of place a person goes to get in touch with the deepest elements of nature and with what life is like without the warmth and light of the sun. It’s like nature’s own sensory deprivation tank. The place was teeming with life, but it was all understated and tucked into the shadows. It would be easy to assume that the darkness would be forbidding to cold-blooded creatures, but I figured there was no way that many bats could be living in one place without their natural predators following. Sure enough, as I tracked a single moving pair of wings along the cave wall, my flashlight caught an iridescent reflection on a rocky shelf: a snake. Some kind of colubrid, likely nonvenomous, which meant I could safely go in for a closer look.
Whether or not a snake is venomous is always the first thought that comes to mind when I spy a new animal and can’t immediately identify the species. This question was especially important here because trying to grab the snake and have a look wouldn’t be as simple as walking over to it. I was about to step off a small, unstable rowboat, and there wouldn’t be much space between me and the snake on the cave’s wall if I jumped out onto the shelf just below it. Moving quickly, I fully extended myself from the boat and reached up over the muddy shelf it was lying on (which was above my head) to capture it before it could slip away. I pulled down a beautiful cave racer, thin and more than five feet long, completely harmless to humans but a deadly and effective predator to bats.
This was my first-ever cave snake encounter. While I looked him over, this guy wrapped himself tightly around my arm, not just anchoring but actually knotting his body over me. He was probably trying to figure out what the hell was happening. I’d be willing to bet he’d never been handled by a human before—and I doubt he ever will be again. Nevong told me that in the five years he’d been visiting these caves, he’d sometimes seen snakes, but he’d never gotten close enough to catch one. He joked about being envious, although he was clearly genuinely excited that I’d gotten to have this experience on his tour.
The racer had beautiful markings that shone in the light, and he coiled calmly in my hands while I checked him out. I kept him for only a few minutes before releasing him exactly where I’d found him. Watching him glide away across the rough rocks, I could only admire this creature who’d innovated a life underground for himself, figuring out how to live without light so he could partake in the never-ending smorgasbord of Puerto Princesa bats.
Chicken Thief
While we were exploring, Nevong told me about a lizard who’d repeatedly been sighted in a local village near the park. The residents were willing to overlook the intruder’s presence—until he started stealing their chickens. I headed out there, hoping maybe I could track down the thief and relocate him to a less-populated area where he’d be better able to find food that didn’t already belong to someone else.
/> The lizard was an endemic species of monitor—the Palawan water monitor. Like all monitors, I knew, this one would be a handful to work with. Monitors are among my favorite species in the world to wrangle because they’re what I consider to be nature’s version of Godzilla. They can get huge (in fact, the largest lizards on earth—Komodo dragons—are monitors), and they’re all muscle, with sharp claws, tails they can use like bullwhips, and some of the scariest bite-force capabilities of any reptile species.
As I walked through the village, I could see kids playing, monkeys perched up in the trees, a dog lazing in the sun outside a hut, and then, right next to one family’s home, the monitor. He was nearly six feet long, head to tail, thick and heavily muscled, lying low at the base of a tree. It was really obvious which creature didn’t belong in this scene—and also why the villagers were not too stoked about having this guy hanging around so close to their homes.
A lizard like that should not be handled by anybody without extensive experience. Large monitors can be aggressively defensive, and their bites can not only easily shred through multiple layers of tissue but can almost guarantee a troublesome infection to follow—one that could even, in an extreme case, be fatal. I figured that unless somebody removed this monitor from the village, it might be only a matter of time before he’d end up on the business end of a weapon. Since nobody else who’d be willing to capture him alive and relocate him was likely to come along, I decided to see what I could do.
The monitor kept a wary eye on my approach, but he didn’t attempt to move away. I’m pretty sure he was used to the locals giving him a wide berth, so he probably expected me to pass on by. A monitor who wasn’t accustomed to people would have been far more skittish. I slowly set my backpack on the ground and sidled a little closer. When I got within a couple feet—his personal space—he realized I wasn’t just a random pedestrian and directed a hiss my way. When I made a move toward him, he took off running.
Monitors always surprise me with their speed, when they choose to turn it on. (The same goes for most reptiles, unless they’re cold.) Within seconds we went from scoping each other out at a distance to a full-on chase. It’s not easy to run in a semi-crouch, but the only way I was going to capture this monitor without hurting him was to crouch down to his level and get my hands on him. At a sprint, I made one giant leap forward, bent my knees and my back, and got a nice grip with my left hand on the monitor’s tail, several inches from the end.
Man, did he not like that. The monitor arched his spine, launched his mouth wide open, and went directly for my face. When we made eye contact (and I’m sure mine were as wide as they can get), the expression on his face read, “Bro, who do you think you are?” He was throwing his body side to side and swinging that gaping, septic mouth in my direction the entire time, madly trying to either get loose or get even. It’s a strange predicament to be holding something so dangerous and potentially destructive, but until we resolved this contest of who was going to make contact first, I had to press on.
I knew I needed to get my right hand down on him in order to stabilize him and put an end to the madness. At times like this, I am grateful for my freakishly long arms. I held the lizard as far out as I could reach, keeping my grip on his tail and bending at the hips to keep my hands as far from my body as possible, my concentration divided between not getting bit and finding an opportunity to get the big guy better under control.
It was a heart-pounding moment, even for someone with extensive experience handling reptiles. I’ve seen people who’ve been bitten by a monitor, including one guy who looked like his hand got caught in a paper shredder. I knew that if this lizard got hold of my flesh, he wouldn’t just bite it, he’d mangle it. That’s what his teeth—long, deadly sharp, recurved, and serrated—were built for, and that’s one of the reasons these animals are so successful in the wild (and, as it turns out, sometimes in villages, too).
Watching for my opening, I caught a second when the monitor was facing away from me and lowered him toward the ground. In the same instant, I brought my right hand forward and clasped him around his shoulders, effectively pinning him against the ground. My hands and legs were covered with mud from hitting the ground during the capture and my breathing was heavy, but my grin was as big as my head.
“All right!” was all I managed to spit out while I tried to catch my breath, still focused on keeping the animal restrained and ensuring that this interaction remained safe for both of us. And then, as I transferred my left hand to the base of the tail, where I’d have more control, I finally got a chance to lean in and closely inspect the lizard and make an introduction, saying, “Hey, beautiful!”
When I had the monitor up close, I could see that he had an open wound with some swelling along the side of his mouth—not too bad, but possibly painful and definitely at risk of infection. Maybe it was a stretch for me to think I could be his friend after what we’d just gone through together, but whether he liked it or not, I was a veterinarian and he was a wild animal with a vulnerable spot that would benefit from treatment.
Talking to the monitor and keeping my head well back, I steadied him and gripped the back of his head and shoulders with my left hand. With my right, I reached under his jaw and eased his mouth open. If he was going to shred a piece of my face, this was going to be the moment.
Thankfully, he held still and let me have a look at his jaw, the inside of his mouth, and, specifically, the area on the inside of his gums that was of concern to me. There were no obvious signs of infection, but I figured as long as I had him in hand and that section of exposed flesh was evident outside his mouth, the least I could do was flush it with an antiseptic. Letting his mouth close, I squeezed some Betadine solution I had in my backpack over the wound and then massaged in a small amount of antibiotic ointment. The monitor, miraculously, didn’t flinch.
With the treatment complete, I hoisted the monitor up and carried him out into the jungle, away from the village and the homes and the chickens. Unfortunately, I could get only a couple miles away. Monitors are smart, roving, opportunistic carnivores, and this dude probably had an even wider territory. As I let him go and he made a beeline deeper into the jungle, I held out hope that this “intervention” would deter him from wanting to head back to the village and its chickens. Watching that big, beautiful predator go, I was grateful for the opportunity to have met and interacted with him.
Moments like that, and like the others I had in Palawan—those days of adventure are what I live for. I was headed home and back to the very different joys and hardships of life in a veterinary hospital. I knew it wouldn’t be long, though, before I sat down with my calendar to figure out where I could go next.
12
Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo
If you could see any animal species up close and go anywhere in the world to do it, what trip would you choose? I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times, and in early 2018, the answer was that I wanted to see mountain gorillas. In order to do it, I’d have to travel to the Virunga Mountains, a volcanic range where the borders of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda meet.
Trekking with the silverbacks is the wildlife encounter of a lifetime, and even though I love traveling alone, this was something I hoped to share with a friend. It had been years since my best friend, Tim, and I had been on an adventure. By the time this trip rolled around, he was married, with two beautiful kiddos and a full-time job. Still, that January, there we were—two of Overland Park’s finest, jetting over the Atlantic on our way to meet one of the greatest and rarest exotic animal populations in the world.
Wanting a Moment
Gorillas are native solely to Africa, and the two species (eastern and western) are separated by about six hundred miles of Congo basin forest in the center of the continent. Eastern gorillas are divided into two subspecies, and the critically endangered mountain gorilla was the species I hoped to see. There are only around a thousand of these gorillas left
in the wild, but the existence of even that many is a conservation success story. Thanks to the aggressive efforts of organizations like the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and Gorilla Doctors, there are twice as many of these amazing animals today as there were just ten years ago.
The place I chose to visit, Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, has helped make that possible in a couple of different ways. First, they protect their gorilla population on preserved land. This isn’t easy—in fact, sometimes it’s literally a war for wildlife. Keeping poachers out of the park and away from the gorilla population is a full-time job, and the heroes who do it put their lives on the line. I have incredibly deep respect for the rangers who go out and defend their wildlife every day.
The second notable program at Volcanoes deserves a lot of credit for the innovative, respectful method they’ve devised for using tourism to benefit the gorilla population. Besides gaining funding by charging small groups of tourists to observe (but not disturb!) the gorillas in their natural environment, this program goes one step further. Knowing that poachers are one of the biggest threats to this endangered species and that most of the poachers are just trying to feed their families, the park is slowly changing local perceptions of the native wildlife by showing people that the gorillas benefit them more alive than they do dead. This sounds like an impossible task, but Volcanoes and other programs like theirs actually hire former poachers to be rangers and gorilla trackers in the park. The park helps locals tie their livelihoods to the gorillas’ survival. In Rwanda, it also uses money the program makes to help build houses and villages and schools for the community’s children. Every step of the way, the locals are discovering that a thriving gorilla population can help them feed their families.