“Crocodile eggs! The injured female crocodile is a mother!” Feye explained. He opened the lid of the cooler, and the white eggs were clearly visible through the dark mud.
Mr. Savage let out a small gasp.
“And we got some great footage of—” Feye began, but I suddenly shoved him. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want to tell Mr. Savage about our run-in with the Mega Croc just yet. Feye glared at me, but I just shook my head.
“Footage of what?” Mr. Savage asked.
“A cool boa we saw,” I lied.
“Splendid! Well, let’s focus on this grand discovery here, kids. We may not have the Mega Croc footage we needed, but this discovery might just be our saving grace.” He went to reach for the cooler when Feye suddenly patted his pockets.
“Oh! Mr. Savage, I think this belongs to you,” Feye said, pulling the bright yellow notebook out of his pocket. He handed it to Mr. Savage, who smiled widely.
“Thank you. Now how about giving me that heavy cooler before you hurt yourself?” He bent down to grab the cooler from me, but I moved away.
“Um, it’s okay, Mr. Savage, I can hold on to them!” I said, trying to keep him from taking the cooler. I was slippery from the mud and I almost dropped it.
“Nonsense, it’s clearly too heavy for you, and we don’t want you putting more weight than you have to on that leg of yours! Let me take it from you, Adrianna,” he said. But he didn’t sound as friendly anymore. I got a bad feeling in my stomach, the same one I’d had in the mangroves when we saw those strangers.
The squeak of a door opening distracted us all.
“Mi tesoro, what do you have there?” Dad asked me, staring at the muddy cooler we were playing tug-of-war with. I turned to look at him and lifted the cooler up a little bit.
“Crocodile eggs! Feye and I figured out she was a mother. We can’t leave her eggs behind,” I said proudly. The eggs would be safe with Dad.
Dad looked surprised and took the lid off the cooler. “Well, I’ll be …” he breathed. He put the lid back on and took the cooler out of our hands, then ushered us toward the room where the rest of the film crew was.
“Julio, allow me to—” Mr. Savage began to tell Dad, arms reaching out to grab the cooler back. But Dad interrupted him, gesturing for him to enter the room before him.
“Nonsense, Rick, the cooler isn’t heavy, and it is in good hands,” our dad said.
Safe. The eggs were safe. I smiled to myself. After a few seconds of Mr. Savage not moving, Dad shrugged his shoulders and went ahead of him.
“Seems the kids are detectives and cracked a case while we were busy getting ready to go home to the sanctuary with the injured croc,” he announced to the group. The lingering boat employees came to crowd around the cooler, now placed on a seat. Feye reached over and took the lid off once more, pointing out the eggs in the mud.
“There are over thirty eggs!” he said, smiling. A female American crocodile typically lays a clutch of between thirty and sixty eggs, so this was a small batch.
“You guys went alone to get these? Who took you to the channel?” our mom asked.
Uh-oh. We knew that tone—we were in trouble. Before I could say anything, my older brother jumped in. “I’m sorry, Mom, but we didn’t want to bother you guys. And Adrianna really wanted to see some more of the mangroves before we left.” “You went out alone?” Mr. Savage asked from the doorway. His voice startled me. He must have silently entered the room behind us.
“We weren’t that far away,” I said. “And we saw Connor and some of the film crew while we were out.”
Mr. Savage shook his head. Mom mirrored his movements, arms crossing in front of her chest.
“Where are they?” Mr. Savage asked.
“Filming some sunset shots,” Feye said, uncertainty in his voice. Mr. Savage grumbled something under his breath that I couldn’t understand.
“I’d like for you all to give us a few minutes,” Mom said, and looked around at the people in the room. They quickly left—even they were afraid of my mom’s angry expression.
“You could’ve gotten lost, run out of fuel, gotten into an accident, or worse—run into some bad people!” Mom said. “These mangroves are not safe for two kids to wander around all alone.”
Feye hung his head low, avoiding looking at our mother. Now it was my turn to speak for us.
“Mom, we just wanted to help. We knew you were all busy, and we didn’t want to bother you. We wanted to show how responsible we could be, too,” I said. Our mother leaned in close and gave us both a big hug. Feye and I looked at each other, pressed against our mother’s chest, surprised. We were expecting her to yell at us, not give us a hug!
“Do not do that again. Understand?” Dad said, arms crossed in front of him. “You’re grounded, and we will be talking about your appearances on the show with Mr. Savage.”
We bowed our heads and nodded.
Mom turned toward us. “While we don’t agree with how you went about everything, we are proud of you for figuring out that she had laid eggs. You really helped her out. I don’t know if you know this, but American crocodiles are actually listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN,” she said.
“What’s the IUCN?” Feye asked.
“IUCN stands for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It’s the world’s oldest environmental organization. Their job is to tell scientists and conservationists, like us, how animals and plants are doing. Are their populations okay? Do they need better protection?” Dad explained, pulling up the IUCN website on his tablet. He showed us different animals like sharks, elephants, lions, sea turtles, and even some species of mice. Each said “Vulnerable,” “Endangered,” or “Extinct in the Wild.”
Dad took the tablet once again and typed something into the website. Up came a picture of the American crocodile with what I recognized as the scientific name underneath: Crocodylus acutus. It said VULNERABLE in big letters.
“What does Vulnerable mean for the crocodiles?” I asked.
“Vulnerable for any animal means that the IUCN thinks they will become endangered unless scientists and other people can help them out,” Mom said. “That means we need to protect them. Usually an animal gets the label Vulnerable because people have destroyed their habitat or hunted them too much.”
“American crocodiles have lost a lot of their homes due to humans,” she continued. “So zoos all over the world, like ours, have breeding programs. That means we help the crocodiles get together and make babies. In some places, people actually steal crocodile eggs, too, so these are very important to keep. We’ll be able to help them hatch safely. That will help their numbers here.”
“So does that mean we will have more than thirty crocodiles at the zoo? That’s a lot of mouths to feed!” Feye looked on, a bit horrified. He helped cut up the food for the big crocodiles and was probably thinking of all the extra work he would have to do.
Mom and Dad laughed, shaking their heads. “We’ll figure that out once we’re home and at the zoo. But we definitely won’t keep all of them. Some may go to other zoos, while the others will get released back out into the wild,” Mom said.
“How will we know if the babies make it?” I asked, wondering if we could ever come back to Cuba and say hi to them.
“We’re going to put tracking tags on the ones we release back into the wild,” Dad replied. “That way we can see where they go! If we get the funding for it, we might be able to come here once a year with crocodile scientists and measure how big they have gotten and how many are still around. We can talk about it with a few friends when we get back home.” Dad looked at Mom, who nodded in agreement.
* * *
The next morning, we all sat at breakfast in silence, enjoying the sights and sounds of the mangrove forest through the boat hotel’s windows for the last time.
Mr. Savage knocked on the door and cleared his throat. “All right, Villalobos family. Pack up your things. The boat to take us inland will be arriving shortl
y. We’ve got a long day ahead of us to get this croc and her eggs back to Sacred Sanctuary and Zoological Park.” He opened the door behind him widely so we could all get out and up to our rooms to finish packing.
When I was done, I picked up Duke and walked over to Connor.
“Should we try to find someone willing to adopt Duke? I want to bring him back, but my parents won’t let me.” I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.
“Don’t worry, Adrianna. I’ll take care of Duke, okay?” Connor said.
“Just promise me that he won’t end up on the streets or in a pound.”
“I promise,” Connor said, and coaxed Duke from my arms.
The rest of the team would join us back home in the next few days. With hugs all around to the Cuban film crew, and a final pet and scratch for Duke, we stepped into the boat and drove away from the mangroves one last time. I looked down into the crocodile holding container and smiled, glad we had rescued this mama.
The boat ride wasn’t too long, and I spent most of it staring at the blue shades in the water. Every now and then a flying fish would soar next to our boat wake, frightened by the noise and possibly saying hello. Just in case they were saying hello, I waved to every single one I saw.
Feye came to sit down next to me. “Why’d you stop me from telling Mr. Savage about the footage we took of that massive croc? Did you want all the credit or something?”
“No, no, I—”
“You don’t have to keep trying to prove yourself to everyone, you know. Mom and Dad might be worried about your safety, but you did a lot of things right and really showed you have what it takes to be a part of this show.”
I smiled at the compliment, nudging him as a thanks. But that wasn’t the reason at all.
“How many really big crocodiles are out there, Feye? They’re a Vulnerable species. So it’s our responsibility to protect the big ones, like this so-called ‘Mega Croc,’ whenever we can.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think we should give the footage over to Mr. Savage.”
“What! But the show is in jeopardy!” argued Feye.
“I don’t think it is anymore. Mr. Savage said that the production team had enough drama to work with, now that we have the eggs. And there’s lots of other stuff, too—the mistake I made with the tag, my bite, us finding the injured croc! If we give the Mega Croc footage to Mr. Savage, we could possibly lead the poachers right to where we found it. Or a bunch of new ones, even. Any of them could end up killing the Mega Croc!”
Feye didn’t say anything, but he looked thoughtful.
“We always say keeping wildlife safe and helping animals is what we love doing most. So, let’s do that,” I said. “We don’t need a TV show to prove anything.”
“But the TV show lets us help even more animals,” Feye countered.
“Not like this! Not by showing poachers where rare and special animals like the Mega Croc are.”
That got through to Feye. He nodded and pulled out his phone. Together we deleted the footage.
The sound of kookaburras greeted me as I opened the car door and jumped out into the hot, summer day. Out of all the birds we housed, the kookaburras had to be the loudest.
I yawned and wiped some of the sleep from my eyes, then stretched my arms upward. As Mom and Dad closed their car doors, we all made our way to the back gates of Sacred Sanctuary and Zoological Park to start our day.
It had been a month since we returned from Cuba with the injured female crocodile and her eggs. Once we had reached Sacred Sanctuary, we called on one of our reptile experts to show us how to tell whether the crocodile eggs were fertilized or not. We found out that they all contained baby crocodiles, and all of them had hatched shortly after.
It was up to Feye, Alessi, and me to cut up their meals and feed them. Half of them would be going to other zoos to help with their breeding programs, while the other half would be going back into the wild.
In a few days, we’d return to Cuba to release those hatchlings back to their home. We’d named the mother crocodile Luz, which means “light” in Spanish. She’d made a full recovery from her injuries and was going back out with them. The producers loved the dramatics of our show, and the happy ending, and had given us the “green light” for more episodes in the future!
The tagged crocodile, who Feye decided to name Terminator, was still pinging away even after all this time, too! My parents and the local Cuban crocodile scientists had been keeping up with his movements in the mangroves to see where he spent the most time. Maybe he and Luz would cross paths.
As Feye cut up the crocodiles’ meat, I took white vitamin pills and shoved them into the center of each piece. Since we were getting ready to release them into the wild, we wanted to make sure the hatchlings were as healthy as possible in order to have the best chance out there. Our lead veterinarian, Dr. Jay Cruz, had figured out the exact amount of vitamins each baby and their mom needed. She was one of my favorite people at the Wildlife Hospital because she didn’t think of me as too young to learn about vet science.
This had to be my favorite part of our job: Getting to take care of the animals, learn about them, and teach people about them and the dangers they face out in the wild is the coolest thing. I had gotten to spend a lot of time with the hatchlings, learning to tell them apart by their different colors and spots.
My favorite was the smallest baby crocodile we had, who was a stunning bright green color. I called her Isabella. She always let me pick her up without ever trying to bite me, even in the very beginning, and she tended to follow me around whatever enclosure we were in when she thought I had food.
“Hey, guys, sorry to interrupt. We’ve got a group to see Adrianna’s croc bite talk in about five minutes. A, are you good to go?” Mom asked.
I nodded and put the rest of the meat down and in the steel bucket. I moved over to the sink and washed my hands with soap and hot water and quickly changed into my khaki shorts.
“Ready to go!” I said.
Connor put a microphone headset on me that wrapped around my ears, and he smiled at me. I wore this whenever I went out into the croc rehabilitation center so the audience could hear me. We quickly tested it to make sure it was working fine, but were interrupted by Duke’s barking.
Connor had ended up adopting Duke, and now he comes in to work with him all the time! So, it’s sort of like Feye and I have our own dog. After a quick pet for Duke, I grabbed the steel buckets full of cut-up meat and went to the back exit of the hospital that led into the croc zone.
I could hear my dad announce me before the door to the croc zone even opened. When it did open, for a second I couldn’t see any of the people who looked down into the arena. With over thirty baby crocodiles that were now about half the size of my arm, we’d had to build a big enclosure to fit all of them! Along with a bunch of professional artists, Feye and I had painted the walls of the enclosure to look like a mangrove forest, the roots of the painted trees disappearing under the sand we had filled the bottom of the enclosure with.
We had a giant saltwater lake on one side of the enclosure, where the baby crocodiles could swim and hunt for live fish. My favorite part was having a bubble made of really tough glass in the center of the whole thing that you could squeeze into and see the crocodiles swimming around you underwater. I had played hide-and-seek with many of the baby crocs, but especially Isabella, in that bubble. I would miss seeing them there all the time!
There were two main areas where people could see the crocodiles. One was closer to the enclosure itself, where we had a walkabout canopy made of wood. From there, viewers could get a bird’s eye view of the crocodiles. The canopy led into the second area, our Wildlife Café, where people could eat, look out at the view from Sacred Sanctuary and Zoological Park, or look down into the enclosure and see the shows. Both parts were packed with people, ready to hear me talk!
“Hola! How are we doing today?” I said into the microphone, waving one hand up in the air while the other was holdi
ng on to both of the steel buckets. The audience roared back a hello, and I smiled. This was one of the coolest parts of my job here at the park, getting to talk to people about the amazing animals we have.
“I’m really lucky to be here today to talk to you all about the American crocodile, many of whom are all around my feet and clearly know I have food.” I laughed as they began to crawl over my feet and try to climb up my leg. I gently shook them off and began to walk to the middle of the enclosure. “They are a species of crocodile that lives in North and South America, including the Caribbean, where we found these little ones!” I put my bucket down on a ledge too high for the baby crocodiles to reach with their little snouts. I looked around to find Isabella, who was easy to spot since she was so bright green. I was the saddest to see her leave. She’d be going to a zoo in Canada to hopefully one day become a mom herself.
I picked her up for a quick second as I explained all about the crocodiles’ anatomy and then put her down when she got super wriggly. She was very patient, but she knew food was nearby and she wanted it now. I laughed and reached into my bucket and put a piece of meat in front of her, which she quickly gobbled up. Crocodiles mainly eat fish, but some of the larger ones eat other kinds of meat like deer or chicken. So we fed the baby crocodiles a mixture of fish and chicken so they didn’t get bored.
I heard a lot of oohs and aahs as I quickly put meat down in certain places around the arena and had the baby crocs follow me around to find it. When I ran out of meat from one bucket, I grabbed the other one that was safely away from their little mouths and did the same thing. The audience clapped and took pictures.
Crocodile Rescue! Page 9