THE REAL CROCODILE HUNTER

This 9/30/01 story by David Panian of the Daily Telegram is reprinted by permission.

ADRIAN - Craig Weatherby doesn't have a funny accent, and he isn't followed throughout the wilderness by a camera crew, but Adrian is home to a biologist who can lay claim to the title of "Crocodile Hunter."

The Adrian College biology professor, laughed about how he just missed Steve Irwin, television's Crocodile Hunter, while on a trip in Kenya.

"Last summer I was on top of a secluded mountain, and the Kenyans said, 'You should have been here last month. There was a real strange guy with a film crew. He was out chasing snakes and acting really strange,' " Weatherby said.

"I asked, 'Was his name Steve?' And they said, 'Yeah.'

"So I said to them, "No, I'm the real crocodile hunter.'"

Weatherby spends a month or more each summer in Africa studying reptiles and amphibians, then returns to Lenawee County to teach and do similar research.

"Here in good ol' Lenawee County, I'm doing the same kinds of things as I do in the 'Dark Continent.' Well, maybe with different animals doing different things, but I'm using the same kinds of science techniques," he said.

Weatherby said he loves going to Kenya for the adventure, to help fellow researchers there and to visit with the people. The Kenyans, Namibians and South Africans use Weatherby's research to help bolster their own research efforts and tourism industries.

"The reason I go into Africa is they are so desperate for help," he said.

Herpetologists - researchers of reptiles and amphibians - tend to stick to North America, where doing research is easier and less dangerous. In Africa, people have to contend with collapsed economies, unstable governments and AIDS. On top of those social dangers, the poor condition of the infrastructure makes research difficult.

"The roads that exist are terrible. It's hard to just find a vehicle to get from one place to another," he said.

Because Weatherby is a white American, he is a target for bandits. He minimizes that threat by going to remote areas that tourists don't frequent and by living primitively.

Weatherby's crocodile encounter occured on a mountain. Apparently some villagers had captured three crocs to put in a pond to keep other animals out of the water. But the pond didn't have a good, sandy area for the female to lay her eggs, so she went to the next best place, a cave.

Weatherby happened to be hiking on the mountain and stuck his head into the cave to see what was there and backed off when he saw the croc.

He's also found there are other dangers, like being pummeled by an elephant.

"For some reason elephants don't like me. I've had a real problem around them," Weatherby said.

"Usually they're pretty good, but I've been chased out of a park. I'm in a Land Rover, and this thing is trying to catch the Land Rover. You're going as fast as you can, but when there's not a road, you can't go very fast."

It's also not uncommon to blunder into a herd of the massive mammals.

"As you're driving, you'd think it's hard for them to hide, but occasionally you'll stop and say, 'Oh, I'm right in the middle of the herd,' " he said.

"If you stop and stay real still, they'll often just go away, but occasionally one gets upset ... and wants to step on something and you're there, so ."

Then there was the leopard tortoise, the second-largest tortoise in the world, that felt a need to show off its masculinity.

"There was this very, very large tortoise that was around the headquarters of this park," Weatherby said. "It was a male, and males will do combat with each other. They're like little bulldozers and they'll push each other. Whoever's the strongest wins, and they push the other one out of the territory and they get all the females.

"As I'm trying to measure this guy, he's starting to show me how much stronger he is than me and bulldoze me over."

Weatherby decided to play along and bent over and tried to push him back.

"I couldn't hold him back," he said. Even when he dug in his feet, the tortoise kept pushing Weatherby back.

"I looked up, and all the sudden there's a crowd of tourists around me, and they're all from Germany, and they're asking, 'What's wrong with you?' " he said. "I'm trying to explain to them, then all of a sudden - bam! -it comes around and hits me from the back. He clipped me, a 15-yard penalty."

Then there was the rump-smacking incident with a water buffalo.

"I was in a tent sleeping at night, and I woke up and something was chewing its cud. In my daze of sleep, I thought it was one of those zebras. So I beat on the side of the tent and hit what I thought was its rump, and it took off. The next thing I knew it was back," and he smacked it again.

When he woke up in the morning, he remembered that zebras don't chew their cud, and he realized it was a buffalo. The dangerous animals have been known to use their horns and throw people into trees.

"You don't go slapping buffaloes on the rump and survive. They'll take your tent and turn it into buffalo patties," he said.

He has also encountered great beauty in what some might consider an unlikely place - the coloring of a Cape cobra.

"This thing is huge. It's like, 6-8 feet long. It's a big snake. And it's completely gold. Every part of his body, from the tip of its nose to its tail, its belly, its back is a beautiful gold color," Weatherby said.

"I'm out in the field, trying to follow the turtles with a South African colleague, and I see one of these things raise up and spread its hood, and it's really menacing. But I was so mesmerized by its beauty that I'm spellbound. It's like I'm hypnotized by this thing's gorgeousness.

"The South African is screaming at me. He wanted me to catch it. So I gave him the snake stick.

"It got away, it went down into a hole, but it was the most beautiful animal I ever saw."

He's also found rare animals, including a tiny frog called a French squeaker that hadn't been seen since 1935.

It was on a 5,000-foot mountain, and is about the size of an adult person's thumbnail.

"The (scientific) name itself is about 20 times bigger than the little animal," he said. "That's probably another reason it hadn't been noticed. No one bothered to bend down and look."

He learned from Bill Branch, Africa's most famous herpetologist, how to differentiate species of toads by taste.

Not by barbecuing them - by licking them.

"If it's bitter, it's this, if it's sweet, it's that," Weatherby said. "So we're out in the middle of the African desert, and we're licking toads to see what they taste like for species identification."

Weatherby said African countries have found they need to have other things besides big game animals like lions and rhinoceroses to give tourists something to learn about. His rare animal finds help with that.

Farmers in Africa, whose farms are measured in square miles, have learned that wealthy Americans will pay $10,000 to hunt just one kudu, a type of antelope. Knowing what kudus need to survive helps the farmers raise extra income.

Weatherby's trail to Africa began seven years ago when he was studying more mundane animals like ring-necked pheasants.

His studies turned to turtles, then he decided to take a first sabbatical to see if other turtles behaved like those in Michigan. Since South Africa has a large variety of turtle species, he went there.

"And then I just fell in love with the country and the people and the environment, and I started to make these really strong friends," he said.

But his visits to Africa and experiencing the cultures there changed him as a person.

"When I came back from Africa the first year, one of my friends picked me up at the airport and said, 'Welcome home, Craig,'" Weatherby said.

"I told him, 'No, Craig is dead. He died in Africa. This is somebody else you're looking at. I'm a new person.' I couldn't explain how, but I was so changed by the experience."

Weatherby said his trips to Africa have given him a greater appreciation of Lenawee County.

"I still am in love with North America and think Michigan is beautiful country, but it's just even more beautiful to me now because of my experiences in Africa," he said. "I come home more appreciative of what I have here. Not just culturally and socially and politically and money-wise, but also the natural resources."