Laurent Shwartz Part 4 - This text about India, written by him around 1995, comes from this unpublished part of his memoirs – Claudine Schwartz Paris, 25 February 2018
Humayun Abdulali, became a particular acquaintance of mine and accompanied me on several naturalist expeditions.
He was a top-notch expert on amphibians and reptiles, and revealed many astounding secrets to me. Once, when we were riding in a car at night, he saw a small snake on the road and he immediately asked the driver to stop. He ran towards the reptile, but instead of placing his foot on its head, he stepped on its tail and the snake bit him.
Fortunately, it was not a venomous snake. I asked him how he could have done this without knowing what kind of snake it was; he replied he knew perfectly and had immediately identified it in the dark. This was only partly reassuring, as he had still mistaken the head and the tail of the snake.
He told me all about different snake species, cobras and pythons in particular. As I mentioned before, I saw several pythons but never saw any cobras. The king cobra is five or six metres long; it is a terrifying beast, lunging at whoever gets too close and capable of great speed.
I think the ordinary cobra is no longer than a metre or a metre-and-a-half; it has the same venomous characteristics as an American rattlesnake but it is far more common. Since many Indians living in the countryside walk around barefoot, there are hundreds of deaths caused by snake bites every year.
Humayun invited me to watch a harvesting of cobra venom, used for biological purposes or to create a cure for people who have been bitten. We entered the cobra farm of the laboratory and one of the men opened a cage. When the cobra wasn't looking, he put his foot on its head, grabbed the cobra by tail and pulled it up: if it is handled this way, the cobra can no longer raise its head. He then put a glass within reach of the cobra: it bit the glass and poured its venom into it. The man wasn't immune but he had anti-venom serum within reach in the laboratory. It is well known that the mongoose is a particularly dangerous adversary for the cobra. The mongoose is from the same family as weasels and martens, Mustelidae, and it is a first-class carnivore with razor-sharp teeth and swift moves. When a mongoose meets a cobra, there are nine chances out of ten that it will kill the snake and eat it. The cobra lifts its head high up the ground to hover over the mongoose and threaten it, but the mongoose moves quickly from left to right, so quickly that the cobra cannot keep up. If it were to lunge at it, it would most certainly miss. This goes on for some time until the mongoose perceives the cobra is tiring and slowing down: at that moment, it jumps at the cobra's neck, killing it on the spot. I wanted to know if the mongoose was immune to the cobra's venom but when I asked around, I only got contradictory answers. Everyone knows the famous mongoose from The Jungle Book, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. A number of Indians who don't want a cobra to slip into their garden take to raising a mongoose. Cities are filled with snake charmers but it is a sorry sight. During his show, the snake charmer releases a mongoose on the snake: it instantly makes for the snake's neck, but isn't given enough time to kill it. However, this certainly harms the snake, and I find it sad in the sense that the poor snake has been bitten innumerable times by the mongoose and stunned into a stupor. Snake charmers usually carry anti-venom serum with them but I have heard of one being killed by his cobra.
Thanks to Humayun, I discovered an extraordinary species of fish. On top of a three-or four-hundred-metre hill, during the monsoon season, he showed me a small pond filled with tiny fish which were a few centimetres long.
"What do you think these fish do during the dry season, when there is no more water in the pond?" he asked me. I was stumped. He then showed me that the rocks along the road we had taken to come there were humid and that water dripped from them constantly.
The little fish would climb up the rocks, sticking to the surface through viscosity, and thus travel up to the top of the hill. Throughout the trip, Humayun would sometimes get out of the car and go examine a birds' nest under a bridge that he had always known to be there.
As I said, Indians are keen on animals, and I have known their interest in tigers in particular. They are just as interested, if not more, in elephants.
Every once in a while, there is in fact an elephant census carried out with extraordinary meticulousness. The date of the census is given months in advance and on that day, all the employees of the Wildlife Commission appointed to the task go visit the herds whose location they know well, count the elephants and calculate the total, give or take a few tens.
The BNHS publishes two books several times a year: one contains articles on the topic of natural history, systematics' descriptions, and thorough studies of animal behaviour. The second one, entitled Hornbill, is much smaller and contains gorgeous pictures with more interesting animal behaviour studies. They are the two best natural history periodicals I know of.
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