Human/wildlife conflict, from crocodiles to leopards, and a lot, lot more...

This is Hemant a few weeks ago keeping an eye out for tiger. Currently Hemant and some of his anti-poaching team are patrolling in the Babai region.  This is serious work in monsoon conditions.  I'm bloody proud of these guys.

So picture this: A man is waiting for his daughter to bring through another basket of water for some work he is doing at the front of his house.  He hears screams, yelling.  He runs to his backyard through which runs a canal barely ten metres from the back of his house.  The scene he sees before him is horrifying.  A crocodile has his daughter's leg in its jaws.  His daughter is clinging to some reeds trying not to get dragged under.  Hi other daughter has grabbed the crocodile by the tail.  His wife is sitting astride the crocodile's back.

The man sprints to the scene.  He thrusts both his hands in the crocodile's mouth.  He is doing everything he can to try and release his daughter from the grip of the two metre reptile.

So that's what's happening.  A family is fighting a crocodile in their backyard.

The man succeeds in releasing his daughter.  The croc latches on to the man's arms.  They roll several metres down the canal.  The man's wife is still trying to wrestle the reptile.  She does enough to make the croc pissed off enough to let go.  The daughters are now standing on the bank screaming, bleeding as they watch their parents beat off a crocodile.

The family are all injured, shaken.  They are all alive.

This happened on 27 April, just less than two months ago.  As I stood beside the canal a few weeks later researching their story, studying photographs and trying to picture this event, I am told the crocodile still lives there.  They had seen it twice since.

I wonder how many times it had seen them.

To get more of this story you'll just have to read the "bloody book" but I promise you this story and many other human/wildlife conflicts  I am uncovering will be worth putting up with my ranting.

Tomorrow I head to a scene where a leopard (or maybe more than one) killed fifteen goats in one night.

So picture this one now: A farmer buys a goat for anything from 8000 to 12000 rupees (over $100 anyway).  Leopard (or snow leopard) kills goat.  The farmer waits several months for 500 rupees in compensation.  500 rupees is nothing.

The farmer is angry for losing a hunk of his livelihood.  The farmer is angry with the government because the compensation is a joke.  The farmer is angry with the leopard, he blames the leopard.

Revenge killing?  To protect his livelihood, his family?

Nepal takes up a fair chunk of my life but I don't profess to understand, I don't try.  The facts are there when you search, search hard.  There's hardly anything in the media and what there is can be seriously twisted.

I have to move my legs every day to find out this stuff.  I talk to people in the jungle, the urban jungle, the mountains.  I learn and learn.

And yet it is teaching me how little I really know...

And I haven't even mentioned the word "tiger" in this post...