PUERTO PRINCESA: A chorus of chirps filled the room as one of the Philippines’ top crocodile breeders checked on his wards in an overcrowded ‘Noah’s Ark’ for one of the world’s most endangered animals.
The chick-like cries came from metal tanks holding the baby Philippine crocodiles, artificially hatched by incubators from eggs that Glenn Rebong and his team had poached from their mothers’ nests.
“We’re producing so many but there are few opportunities to release them in the wild. So they get stuck here and you get overcrowding,” Rebong said at the two-hectare (five-acre) Palawan Wildlife Rescue and Conservation Centre.
Crocodylus mindorensis once lived in large numbers in freshwater lakes and rivers across the Southeast Asian archipelago, and are endemic to the Philippines, but were decimated by illegal hunting for the fashion industry.
Fearful humans mistaking the timid creatures for their man-eating saltwater cousins and killing them, as well as a loss of habitat, have also contributed to their demise.
By the time the Philippine government launched its captive breeding programme in 1987, a survey found only about 250 were estimated to be in the wild.
Today there are likely fewer than that, as the areas they have been seen in recent years have got steadily smaller, according to Rebong.
The International Union of Conservation and Nature lists them as “critically endangered”, which is one step away from extinct in the wild.
The largest collection of the species now live at the centre, while two smaller private breeding operations elsewhere in the Philippines and some small sanctuaries in the wild are also key to the crocodiles’ survival.
Built with Japanese development aid, the now financially struggling centre in the southwestern city of Puerto Princesa is home to about 500 crocodiles, about half of them freshwater and the rest “salties”.
The centre augments a meagre government budget by putting some of the baby and adult crocs on display for tourists, who are warned not to stick their hands or feet into the enclosures.
AFP
