Crocodile and Caiman Hunting

    Crocodile and caiman hunting: wet, muddy, and soaked. No one would willingly want to be any one of those options, in the dark, wearing regular clothes, with rubber boots that should've been water proof, except there were holes in them. (Pura Vida!)

    But why would we do all of that just to NOT hunt for crocodiles and caiman. In fact, when it was our turn to go crocodile and caiman hunting, we found 2 juvenile caiman: one close to adulthood, and one that was quite small; which I even got to hold! All of this might sound exciting, or scary, but there weren't many times where we actually experienced catching caimans and getting chased by caimans. Despite the title, both the group I was in and the other group, didn't see a single crocodile and only saw caimans.

    Recognizing whether or not the giant lizard was a crocodile or a caiman was pretty easy since all we had to do was shine some white light at their eyes: crocodiles would have yellow eyes; caimans would have red eyes. Catching them however very much depended on the size of what you were catching. Us volunteers didn't actually do any of the catching, but we were tasked with measuring young crocodiles and caimans if they hadn't already grown 2 ridges on their tail. If they did though, all we had to do was tag it if it hadn't already been tagged.

    Now moving on to what mostly happened when I went croc/caiman hunting. Doing a quick summery, we went to a river first where we found and CAUGHT our only 2 caimans. The first one being already tagged, and the second one being a lot smaller so we had to do some measurements. I was even able to hold it, which the skin felt like a weird blend of smooth plastic, and bumpy surface.

    Instantly when going into the warm water of the river, some people had a sock soaking issue. Despite everyone wearing "water proof" rubber boots. Some people had holes in their boots that weren't patched up at all. I was VERY "lucky", and got the 1 pair of boots that EACH had a hole in them. Despite having the obviously inferior boots, it didn't really matter in the end as everyone would have to go through near waist high water.

    Once we had experience trekking through the cleaner, non-muddy water of the river, we went to the beach, which was at low tide, but not low enough for us not to get soaked socks. After a little bit of walking and wading through on the beach and through the water, we got to the truly muddy areas to go searching for crocs and caimans. Through out this whole adventure, there was this one moment where we had to cross a particularly muddy and deep section to get back to solid dirt. The thing was, there was a fully grown 2 meter caiman at least 5 meters from where we needed to cross. While everyone was crossing, the caiman went into the water and everyone went into a sort of hushed panic.

    Everyone was going a little bit faster through the water, while also avoiding pockets of mud that would suck you to the ground. Fortunately no one was hurt nor traumatized.

Well, that was my experience with croc and caiman hunting: miserable for my socks, feet, and pants; very cool and dopamine inducing for my brain. It was lots of fun finding a lot of caimans, lots of suck, finding mud everywhere.

Signing off,

Huy