Jungle > Articles > A Crocodile Tale

'No Se Bane' said the sign - Don't Go Swimming! - above the etched-out silhouette of a crocodile. I was standing on a wide bridge above the mouth of the Rio Grande de Tarcoles, on the central pacific coast of Costa Rica, starring down at a dozen crocodiles wallowing in the shallow water below. The smaller ones were female; the largest a male, almost four metres of chocolate brown scaly skin, as if he'd walked out of the pages of a children's story book. Amongst these dinosaurian beasts, horses were keeping cool in the hazy, humid heat, by standing knee deep in the shallow water. They warned off the crocodiles with no more than an irritated flick of their tail.

“What would happen if I went to bathe in that river?” I asked our guide, Carlos Mata. “The crocodiles would run away,” he said.

Despite the warning sign, people do swim in these waters. The Costa Ricans - known as Ticos - go snorkelling for shrimps up the saltwater creeks without a flicker of fear, where the crocodiles like to sun themselves on the sandy banks. Attacks by crocodiles are exceedingly rare. The threat is almost entirely the other way around; humans are increasingly a danger to Costa Rica's crocodiles.

At one end of the bridge, a rural policeman sat in the shade of a caoba tree, a pistol slung on a belt around his waist. He watched as yet another minibus of croc-spotters arrived, an excited gaggle of beanie-hatted tourists. They leant over the bridge, just like us, starring down at the riverbed. It was dried up around the edges, like a huge silty puddle, and it took some minutes to distinguish the crocodiles from the gravely earth. Then their guide took out a plastic carrier bag and started tossing chunks of raw meat over the side of the bridge, down towards the crocodiles. They opened their mighty jaws, displaying teeth that a Hollywood horror movie would be proud of, and closed them quickly over the bloody chunks. Inside, their mouths looked so tender, as soft and pink as a baby's bottoms. Sometimes, they snapped at each other, in competition for the food. Then, the beanie-hatted tourists snapped them, clicking their pricey Pentax and Olympus cameras. The guide was giving them the photo opportunity of a lifetime - a magnificent shot of a metre-long wide open crocodile's jaw.

Carlos began to shout. He was furious. “What do you think you're doing,” he wailed at the guide, “feeding meat to the crocodiles?” The guide just carried on tossing out bloody chunks from his carrier bag, pleased that this minibus load of tourists were getting such good photographic souvenirs of his tour. Carlos called out to the policeman - “Can't you see what this man is doing?” - but it was a very hot day, and he just shrugged his shoulders and refused to leave the shade of the tree. Carlos dispatched our driver, Jose, to the nearby park rangers office, just three kilometres away.

It is illegal to feed the crocodiles. The Rio de Tarcoles is in the buffer zone of the Carara Biological Reserve. The park spreads out behind the mouth of the river, where each day at twilight a flood of scarlet macaws migrates from the tropical forest to the mangrove swamps. The forest floor is alive with poisonous snakes, and the black and green poison arrow frog lives here.

The crocodiles continued to perform for us. Sometimes, you could see the whole of their bodies drying to a dusty brown on the riverbank; sometimes, just their eyes stuck up out of the water as if in a cartoon. One thrashed an angry tail at a horse; unintimidated, the horse kicked back. A yellow and brown northern jacana bird landed on the huge male crocodile's head and the cameras clicked again.

Jose returned with two khaki-clad park rangers. They looked officious, but they shrugged their shoulders, too. It was forbidden to feed the crocodiles in a buffer zone, but what could they do? There were only fourteen of them to patrol a 10,000-acre park. They estimated there were about a hundred crocodiles in the Tarcoles delta. But if the feeding continued, the crocodiles would learn to expect it, and their self-sufficiency and survival would be threatened. Only last week someone fed a crocodile something - they never found out exactly what - that poisoned it very slowly. It took three days to die.

But feeding the crocodiles is the least worry of the park ranger's worries. Poachers are a far greater concern. They attempt to kill the bigger crocodiles for their skins, but this is a dangerous profession; it's difficult to bag a full grown male. So the poachers mostly go for the babies. They capture them in a net, breed, and then sell and smuggle them out of the country as exotic pets. They'd lost count of how many crocodiles they'd lost that way.

Carlos was maudlin; a naturalist by training, he was watching as slowly, all over Costa Rica, the national parks and wildlife refuges, which cover quarter of the country, were being abused. Although relatively wealthy compared to its neighbours, Costa Rica is not a cash rich country, and tourist dollars have overtaken coffee and bananas as the biggest industry. 70,000 tourists - mainly from America - visit each year, in a country with a population of just 3 million. The temptation for individuals to cater to their cheap needs is great. It is the tourists that should be reprimanded, not the guide. Yet not one of them refused the meat.

I tried feebly to cheer Carlos up by treating him to a refresco - a delicious tropical fruit juice of guanabana, guava, passion fruit or maracuya, which is sold on every other street corner. He was determined not to let the matter rest. He was going to contact the guide's tour company and report what he had seen. But we all knew that it would be futile. The tour company had entertained the tourists; the tourists had their photographs. Everyone - except Carlos and the crocodiles - was happy. It will take more than one guide to change tourists' attitudes. But I was proud that I had been in Carlos' minibus. I toasted him with my refresco - Carlos E. Arce Mata, protector of the crocodiles.

Articles

• More from Dea Birkett
• More on the same theme