Capturing the Moment

The big one  I have been surrounded by animals as long as I can remember. I grew up with snakes sneaking out of their cages in my room, gators in the back yard, and birds of prey being nursed back to health by my parents. These exotic pets seemed to get along peacefully with all the wild animals that were just passing through the wilderness area that was our back yard. Some of my earliest memories are of these animals so it is pretty natural that I associate Savannah with animals and always hope to see as many as I can when I do make it back. This visit provided a ton of wild animals from sea turtles, to sharks, to a rarely seen triplefin fish, bottlenose dolphins, ospreys, an armadillo, and of course lots of alligators. In fact I was able to get the whole gang together with my dad for a night of alligator spotting. Splitting up and setting out    For many years my dad caught, tagged, and released alligators in the savannah and low country area. So af...

 Welcome to the land of the dragons. There is only one place in the world you can go to see Komodo dragons ( Varanus komodoensis) , the largest lizards on earth, and that is in Komodo National Park. These guys are big! The largest wild specimen on record was 10 ft 3 in long and weighed 166 kilograms or 370 lb, including undigested food. There are only a few islands in the National Park where the dragons live. We went to Rinca Island where around 1,300 dragons live in the wild.   There are small villages on the island as well, and just a week before we were there a villager was ambushed from behind and bitten by a dragon. This is a very serious concern. Not only do they contain close to 60 kinds of bacteria in their saliva which causes sepsis in the prey, but there is also new evidence that they may be venomous as well. In the wild they are able to take down huge water buffalo just by sneaking up on it at the watering hole, biting it once, and letting i...