Nirmal U. Kulkarni remembers how he became a neighbourhood hero when he caught a snake while still in class 8 or 9. Goa "was like a small town (then, around 1995-96), and there was a lot of greenery around, much more than what it is there (now)... People were actually encountering snakes more."
Word spread, and more and more people started calling him to rid their homes of snakes they themselves were scared of. When he was in class 12 in junior college, he caught a snake that eventually bit him as he was showing it off at college. Kulkarni remembers that the bite was "excruciatingly painful".
As he lay in hospital recovering, Kulkarni got a visit from two mentors, including renowned environmentalist Claude Alvares, who emphasized that he was at a fork in the road: either get into wildlife conservation and research earnestly or stop this hero-giri altogether.
(Image courtesy Nirmal Kulkarni)
After thinking deeply about it, Kulkarni decided he was in for the long haul. Now, the trouble was that in 1999, there was no such things as a college degree in wildlife conservation in India. There was, however, one resource that Kulkarni says was available in spades and which proved invaluable in his journey: senior conservationists had the time to talk to novices and guide them.
Kulkarni signed up for all kinds of conservation projects, including some that allowed him to walk India's forests. On one such trip in the early 2000s, he volunteered to set up camera traps and do line transects. He recalls that camera traps to accurately count animals in the wild was an unproven technology then and funding was poor. Dr Ullas Karanth, who devised the counting method, was taking volunteers to walk the forests for 10 days at a time.
The first three days, Kulkarni explains, a senior conservationist would lead the walks. Later in the trip, the volunteers took on greater responsibilities as they set up cameras and walked down forest paths to eyeball any animals or signs of them nearby.
It was on one such trip that he met Dr Karanth. Kulkarni has thanked Dr Karanth in his latest book Eye to I with my first tiger, in which two teens - Nandu and Salu - go on a similar camera trapping and line transecting adventure as he did years ago. Karanth's projects take him to different parts of the country, from Arunachal Pradesh in the North-East to the Nagarhole and Bandipur in the south.
In an interview with Moneycontrol, Kulkarni, now a herpetologist, explained why almost everyone in India will encounter a snake at least once in their lifetime, what to do when you spot a snake, the link between garbage and snakes around homes and inhabited areas, his new book and why readers aged 9-15 are better placed to read and understand it today than at any other time in history. Edited excerpts:
Snakes have been spotted on two different trains lately - one was captured on video on a Jabalpur - Mumbai Garib Rath train in late September and another one on the Jharkhand-Goa stretch on October 21. As a snakes-and-amphibians expert, what is your advice on what to do if you spot a snake in a train? More broadly, what to do if you spot a snake in a place where you don't expect to see one?
We are an amazing country. We've got a lot of snakes. We are a country that's known for its snakes. In fact, a colleague of mine discovered a new species on October 22 that he has named it after Leonardo DiCaprio. The current count is something like 354 snake species in the entire country, which is amongst the most diverse species in the world.
So at some point of time, anyone and everyone in the country will see a snake in their lifetime. This is a given. If people have not (seen a snake), then I think people are not looking around nicely. Snakes are everywhere; from our high-altitude areas in Ladakh to Andaman and Nicobar, from Goa and Rajasthan to urban cities like Mumbai and Delhi. They occupy every single niche, and which is why people like me, we love them.
But at the same time, we also have 50-plus venomous species of snakes in the country. And out of those 50 species, there are 10 or 12 species which are what we call medically important snakes. Which basically translates into that if there is a bite, then it needs medical attention because they're if not treated medically, there can be a fatality. For this, there's something called a snakebite protocol.
It's in an all-India protocol. But the most important thing when you see a snake is that you step back. We don't recommend running away, but it's always good to step back and see the snake. Ninety percent of the times, when an individual does this - and this includes a single human being, or a group of people, or a person with a dog because many times when they do spot a snake it happens when they're walking a pet - the snake itself moves away.
More than 90 percent of the times, the snake has sensed you before you see the snake, because snakes rely on vibrations in the ground and can sense from air particles far better than what our eyes can do. Their sensory organs are very, very evolved and they have sensed you first, and the thing that they want to do is, they want to just move away.
So when you've seen a snake and then you're stepping back, what you're doing is creating more place for this snake to move away. And that's what happens (it moves away more than 90 percent of the time). That is what we call a human-snake interaction, which means that you've seen the snake, the snake has sensed you, and that's a safe interaction.
There are times when there's conflict, which means that by mistake you've stepped on the snake and got bit. Or the snake has followed a rat into somebody's house, people are sleeping on the floor and they've got bit. So in terms of conflict situations like this, where there is an accident where the snake has bit you or you think the snake has bit you - say, you're walking somewhere, you think that you stepped on something soft and squishy that may or may not be a snake, but you don't know what to do - the one, single first-aid recommendation that all of us across the country give is go to the nearest medical hospital in the least amount of time and nothing else. Don't try to torniquet the area or cut or take a picture of the snake so the doctor knows what kind of snake it is.
No need for a picture of the snake even, to know which antidote needs to be administered?
Even if I take the snake which has bitten me with me to the hospital and tell the doctor that this snake has bitten me, they will still not listen to me. They are not concerned about species. They basically look at what type of venom it is, whether it is something called neurotoxic venom, which means it affects the nerves in our system, which is all cobras and kraits and sea snakes, or they look at something which is hemotoxic venom, which is basically vipers and things like that, and medical treatment is given accordingly. They are not interested in what species it is, how rare or how common. It is basically on these two aspects, and that is how medical treatment is done. Do not waste time - these days people are actually making videos after being bit. There's no sense in that.
The best advice that one can give to someone who's staying in areas where there are snakes, and this is everywhere in India, or where there's a lot of greenery around, is that you figure out which hospital has a ventilator machine and a dialysis machine and is good at doing snake bite treatment before an incident happens. That is helpful, because after an incident, if you start searching, there's a lot of delay. We always tell people that you figure out beforehand, this is the hospital which has good treatment. This is the hospital where the doctors are good and have experience in doing this (snake bite treatment). This is the amount of time that it wi ll take in a private vehicle or by an ambulance to reach that place. If that protocol is done, then snake bite (fatality) actually can really, really be minimized.
The other thing, of course, is taking care of your garbage. The more garbage we create, the more snake conflicts we have. This has now come on out as a very big revelation to a bunch of us. The more garbage you create, the more rodents (will come), and the more rodents (can mean), more snakes. So compost your garbage, segregate it, take care of your garbage, at least in urban areas, then there is less of snake-bite incidents.
(Image courtesy Nirmal Kulkarni)
You mentioned neurotoxins. We have heard of snake venom parties where snake venom is used to get high. How horribly traumatizing can that be for the snakes?
I do not know of actual videos where people are being bit directly. What we know is that venom is being taken out and that venom is then being injected. But in both the cases, first of all, it is not legal. It is absolutely illegal to do this. The other aspect is that removing snake venom like that, in a way where you are inducing the snake to bite or even extracting venom and then getting it out - is a very painful process for snakes, especially for short-fang snakes like the cobra or, they are looking at coral snakes which have less dosages of venom - because you end up actually hurting the snake quite a lot, so much so that either the snake would die probably after a few of these incidents.
The other aspect is the handling process is such that there are multiple internal injuries (to the snake) and it is absolutely risky for the person because, I'm assuming that doing this with adult snakes, many times, the snakes themselves cannot figure out, because of the pain and because of the handling process, they will not be able to control how much venom (they are secreting) and that can eventually lead to many accidents, including death. So it's a completely messed up affair, and as I said, absolutely not legal. And it's not ethical, of course.
There has been a severe clampdown on these activities. But more than that, the fact that something like this is even being attempted in the country, means we need a lot of awareness to happen that this is not something that's cool.
How did you get into conservation work?
I grew up in Goa when the entire state was like a small town. There was a lot of greenery around, much more than what it is there. Slowly people started moving in and there was development happening, which means that snakes were coming out (from what were initially uninhabited, possible green, areas). People were actually encountering snakes more.
I caught my first snake when I was in 8th grade or 9th grade in school and I overnight became like a neighborhood hero because I did that. I now realize that that was a non-venomous snake. I was in a boys' school also, and at that age, when you do something like that, you suddenly become a really cool dude. And I kept on catching snakes around in neighborhood, left, right, because people started calling me and they were scared. I got an old book on with black and white photos by Romulus Whitaker to help me identify these snakes at that point of time. And this continued till about 11th or 12th grade.
When I was in 12th grade, I caught a snake near college in somebody's house. I got the cobra to college; and I got bit there showing off. It's not only painful to be bit, but for the people around it's quite scary because one can die.
That was a very, very big game-changer for me. I was in hospital; it was an excruciatingly painful bite. I was fortunate enough that at the time two mentors of mine, one of them is Dr Claude Alvares who is considered as one of the environmental father figure, came up and told me that if you're doing this, do it properly, otherwise don't do it.
I thought about it a lot. I was still in pain of course, but I decided to do it seriously. That is when I went to first the Pune Snake Park - it was in Pune at that point of time, and they were doing some good work. From the snake park, I wanted to move on, so I went to the Rom Whitaker Croc Bank. It went from being a hobby to a passion to a career later on.
I worked with a whole lot of different organizations. At the time when we were doing this, very few people were doing actual snake research. A lot of my work is also based in Northeast India. We did a lot of expeditions there, starting about 25-30 years ago, where very few were doing research at the time.
Then I moved on from snakes to frogs to lizards and crocodiles and came back to frogs and snakes again. And I'm doing pit vipers again now. But basically it's all herpetology. In between all that, because I was studying ecology, I had to get into looking at other wildlife. And that is where I met Dr Ullas Karanth and that is where large mammals came in. And that's why the book...
You mentioned getting bit by a Cobra in class 12. Which year was this?
I have to calculate back and see... so 1999; because I remember getting my 10th grade certificate in '97.
And immediately after your 12th, you decided you wanted to study conservation?
There was nothing called conservation; we had just two colleges, one was the Wildlife Institute of India, which were more forestry based, where most of our forest officers went. And other universities like Pondicherry University. My options are very limited to what I could do, but what I really wanted to also do was field work. So I would balance it out between holidays to go into these places, into conservation, to basically sit and learn from all these guys. Those were the days where there was less of media. I've had the good fortune of sitting and working alongside some of the most amazing, very senior researchers and conservationists because at that point of time they had time. Those were the foundational years where a lot of people from the BNHS (Bombay Natural History Society) and other places were coming (to the Western Ghats); it was the transition phase, where seniors were coming in to do field work in Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra here and Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya in the North-East - newer avenues, actually, after central India.
(Image courtesy Nirmal Kulkarni)
You've written about Dr Ullas Karanth in 'Eye to I': Two questions from that: How did you meet Dr Karanth and what part did he play in this book?
Center for Wildlife Studies and Wildlife Conservation Society together used to do - I don't know whether they do it now - these 10-day surveys.
What happened was that Dr Karanth actually came up with this new way of doing (wildlife) surveys, which was based on camera trapping as well as based on transect line surveys. And he had to prove this. Funding used to be less, so there used to be fewer research assistants. At that time, they came up with a volunteer program where in 10 for 10 days you would actually go into the forest and stay there. For the first three days, you walk the forest with a senior person, like a forest guard, leading the survey and doing both camera trapping as well as line transects. And then for the next six or seven days, you led the trail. That is, you were walking first and this forest guard was walking behind and you document everything. And it became a methodology which was then fine-tuned over the years. What happened was, there was a large volunteer cadre, people who knew how to do surveys, in this part of South India, in Annamalai, Bandipur, Nagarhole. But it was also a time when there was a whole lot of other parallel things going on. There was a time when a lot of South Indian wildlife films were being made. Logging was still going on.
It was a time when a bunch of us wrote notes. The wildlife space was different, you could still walk in the forests, which you cannot do now. There are rules and Project Tiger has come in more strongly. But one of these trips, I remember signing up saying that I wanted to go there. I went to one, and we ended up becoming a group of friends who kept going again and again. At some point I met Dr Karanth among other amazing senior researchers and conservationists. There was a bunch of people, actually, some of them have passed on, some of them are still around. But yeah, that's how I remember the trips.
Do you remember which year you went on your first volunteer trip?
Somewhere around 2000-2002.
Tiger pug mark in Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary, Goa. (Image courtesy Nirmal Kulkarni)
Is this book autobiographical? The lead characters, Nandu and Salu, seem to be a little bit younger than you would have been on your first trip... Is that right?
Yeah, it's partly autobiographical. But we signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements for the volunteer programmes), which is why we haven't put in the entire details. But yeah, when I went there, I was older than the characters in the book.
Who's the ideal reader for this book? From the language and concept, it seems advanced for 8- or 9-year-olds...
When I started out, I wanted to actually appeal to 14-15-year-olds. But in today's time, there are a lot of nature camps, wildlife awareness programs that one can go to; where in our time, there weren't many. And I thought that this could probably appeal to them (children going on nature treks and wildlife awareness camps) because you are actually looking at not only doing the trek or camp, but you're also doing a whole lot of science at that age. I've done a few readings around, and gone to schools, and I think 9-year-olds now, in today's age, are also really tuned into what is happening around them specifically because schools take them for these walks and nature trails.
So, I think it (the readership for this book) is somewhere between 9- to 15-year-olds.
Eye to I book cover, and author Nirmal Kulkarni. (Image credit: Perky Parrot/Niyogi Books)
When Nandu and Salu finally spot a tiger in 'Eye to I With My First Tiger', Nandu mentions there's a certain garlic chutney smell. Does this have a basis in reality, in terms of what it smells like when you a tiger approaches?
It does. It does.
It is scientifically proven that if you see something, you may forget it, but if you smell something, then that is an imprint on the brain that we will never forget all related to something. And it's always been like that.
So when we used to walk the forest with these guys (the forest guards and senior conservationists), they always told us that you have to smell the animal first more than looking at the animal and then you have to relate it with a particular scent. So a gaur smells in one way an elephant smell in a different way.
For me, here in Goa, we are a lot about food smells. So I would always relate it to food smells. I do it even today: if I see something, I try to imprint it (in my mind) with a smell. So tigers, if one has freshly passed across the path and it's wet monsoons and the tiger's wet, it smells like yum garlic chutney.
In the book, the boys crouch in the grass while one of them is howling with fear when they see the tiger. What should one actually do if they spot a tiger?
Now when people see a tiger, it either in a Jeep or they see it from very far. But there was a time when one could walk the forest. When you're walking the forest and you're on foot and the tiger is on foot, the entire forest is aware that this animal either wants to hunt or does not want to hunt.
If it does not want to hunt, everybody's really chill. (They realize) this animal is moving across. The sentry (langurs) is giving a watch, the cheetal is looking at it.
Once the tiger decides to hunt, and it does this thing with its ears, there's this shiver going down its back, that is the time when the forest erupts and it is phenomenal. And every forest erupts in a different way. In Kanha, it is different. In Tadoba, it's different. In Kaziranga, the rhinos do some of the most amazing things when they know a tiger is on the hunt. All of this is lost on human beings now.
But when we are walking the forest, and this happens, the first things that most people do, whether it is a seasoned forest officer or a new person who's coming in as a volunteer at that time, is that they freeze: you know that you're standing still, but then you're not standing still. There is always, at any given point of time, a certain shiver which is going down your spine. Because however far you're standing, when you are on the ground, it's not a long distance for an animal like the leopard or the tiger to cover. So you have a whole lot of thoughts about what will happen, what will it do? What will it do, what will it not do?
Now, every time when we go through a briefing, when we are going into the forest, we are always reminded that these animals look like they are doing their own thing, but they are wildlife. If they decide to do something, it is very quick. And this thought, no one ever forgets. I've walked the forest for 25 years now. But every time I'm walking the forest, I know that if I see a sloth bear or if I see an elephant, I know that they look amazing from where I am and they look like they are doing their own thing, but it is wildlife, and it can turn and it can attack.
So these thoughts keep going through the mind. There's a lot of fascination also, of course. Now there's photography. Many times, you're doing all of this with a camera in your hand. You're also taking pictures, so you get that sound of the shutter in your head all the time. But besides that, yeah, I've actually seen people shout, like really shout loudly, (when they see a tiger) either because they're fascinated or they're scared or both. I've also seen people run away when they've seen their first tiger, not knowing that there're elephants in the other direction, which are equally or more difficult to handle.
The tiger is just doing what it wants to do. And it makes you feel very small. It is the tiger's forest, it is the jungle. And these two children were very close to the animal. It could have done a whole lot of things. But it is not what it wants to do. It wants to go about its own business. And that is what is called coexistence in today's parlance.
Increasingly, for example, we're finding leopards in cities like Mumbai or Bangalore. The thing to do there again is to just leave the animal alone and try and walk away?
Yes, the best thing is to stop. See, animals like a tiger can actually sense a human being 2 miles away, a leopard can sense you 1.5 miles away. So (conservationists) we keep telling people that you don't see the animal, the animal is letting you see it. If it didn't want you to see it, it would have just walked away and just not be bothered. It's letting you see it. So see them for some time because they look beautiful, but then walk away. I seen people trying throws a small stone at times, but that's silly. You just walk away.
What projects are you working on now?
My own basic projects are more reptile-centric right now. I work on a critically endangered species of freshwater turtle. It's a large turtle that weighs about 50 kgs, called the Leith Softshell turtle. It's found in the Western Ghats; I am working on it in Goa and Karnataka. There's almost three generations of people who haven't even seeing this turtle; it's pretty rare now. We're first trying to create awareness amongst people in the region where it is found and then create awareness amongst our enforcement agencies like the forest departments that it is endemic, which means it is only here, and it is also endangered.
So how did it come to be endangered? Is it hunted? Is it because of habitat loss?
There has been a decline in habitat. Part of it also was the canopy of this turtle, which is the cover around the shell, the circular skin part around the shell is called the canopy. So the canopy was extensively used, rather illegally traded, for making soup in South-East Asia.
And I just finished a project: Goa has this local heritage drum called the Gomat, which uses monitor lizard skin. And there has been a thrust to change to an alternative skin which is a goat skin and not that of a wild animal.
I'm also now doing another project on trying to create awareness about Oliver Ridley Turtles amongst fishing communities in Goa.
I am also doing one in the North-East, in Arunachal Pradesh, which is documenting human-nature interactions. I'm trying to figure out how, culturally, communities in Arunachal Pradesh are increasingly looking at human-nature interactions in different ways and what they were doing before.
So, what does a day in the life of Nirmal Kulkarni look like? Could you find yourself in the northeast one day and in the Western Ghats the next? Or is there some sort of regular pattern?
There is a pattern; I follow the monsoons, as any herpetologist would do. The rains really matter a lot for us. I'm here where it's the southwest monsoons; June, July, August, September is when I am sure to be in the Western Ghats and then February to April-May onwards, I'm in the northeast. And at times, in-between, there is some cyclonic stuff, it's South-East Asia. So proper tropical jungles is where I work and thrive. I only saw snow in the Himalayas for the first time last year.
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