|
|
CROCODOPOLIS world of crocodilians TM SCIENCE · CULTURE · INDUSTRY · NEWS · COMMUNICATION · CONSERVATION
|
||||
|
FEATURES
profiles
February 8, 2007
Ralf Sommerlad,
Der Krokodilfachmann (continued)
EPILOGUE: REVERBERATIONS. It
was 5:00 am at Lake Griffin, and Sommerlad, Ross and Percival were
preparing to start their day as the orange sun began to peek over the
silhouette of treetops to the east and burn much of the night’s
moisture. Sommerlad stepped from his colleagues to the lake bank to
quietly enjoy his morning constitutional – sips of hot coffee - and
scan the lake more closely. This
setting was a far cry from a typical day in the life of most people.
Here, away from the world at large, the land is quiet. The Anhinga birds
hunt fish, the purple-bloomed pickerelweed as their pavement; the
dragonflies perch in still life on fallen oak; and the alligators, the floating saurian, are scattered about the watery
platform like calm, traveling logs. Here in the Florida wilderness,
wrapped in the context of the warm twilight fog, such things as
international time zones, mortgages, passports, and politics have no
meaning. In
early morning the alligators are active, and socialize as these
reptiles do, their startling bursts of sounds breaking the stillness of
the early air. Bellowing deep from within their armored husks they emit pulsating roars, pulling and pushing volumes of air through their
bodies, trembling at their flanks and blowing it out as fog from their
snout tips. One of them speaks, and others respond, male and female,
across the lake, announcing their stations in absurd cacophony. Here the
alligator rules, and when it exclaims, startled birds burst into the
air from their low perches, and frogs and turtles vanish from their pads
into ripples of water. Explorer
William Bartram may have exaggerated the
primordial mis en scene of this wilderness in his expressionistic
descriptions of it in the 18th Century, but one who has
experienced it may easily forgive him, for he was probably desperate, in
his own literary insecurity, to share the height of this peculiar native
drama with myriads of readers who would read of his intrigues in the
angular, sanitized comfort of parlors and salons.
In this setting, increasingly foreign to our modern world, one may feel
connected and lost, all at once. Perhaps the wide-eyed, exotic boy from
Frankfurt am Main intuitively imagined the feeling of
this tableau while staring at the engravings and photographs is his
nature books, so many years ago, The Mystery pulling the child’s eyes
closer to the pages. The
boy had come a long way. No longer the boy, but the man, the
conservationist, there to lend his expertise and passion in an effort to
save those characters in the books, now for him flesh and blood
organisms, important to Earth’s ecological balance, their existence
precariously dependent upon the human mammals who dominate their world. "This
was the most amazing moment of my life," Sommerlad said of the
experience that morning, his eyes beginning to well up. "It was
incredible."
Sommerlad, with an alligator. (Photo: Rene Renz)
Fini.
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
