King Cobra and I: Romulus Whitaker (Agumbe)

 Kingdom of the cobra

ROMULUS WHITAKER

JUST inland from the west coast of southern India a spine of ancient hills rises 2000 metres above the scorched plains. Hidden valleys of very wet, dark, primeval rainforest still harbour wonders that no biologist has seen or described. One of the top predators that rule these valleys is a giant reptile: the king cobra.

I was fortunate to grow up in these Western Ghats, having done my schooling in the Palni Hills between 1952 and 1960, and thereafter I spent my life pursuing my passion for reptiles. After a failed attempt at college in the USA, a stint in the US Army and the honour of working for the late William Haast at the Miami Serpentarium, I returned to India to set up the Madras Snake Park. But I always made sure I had plenty of time to wander the forests of the Western Ghats searching for and studying king cobras and the other delightful reptiles that live there.

In 1973 my short article in the WWF Newsletter ‘Save Silent Valley’ sounded the alarm for what became one of India’s first big environmental controversies. And we won, the dam was never built and Silent Valley was saved. But over the decades I’ve seen the forests and wildlife disappear, despite the best efforts of dedicated conservationists. Forests have been cut down at an alarming rate for infrastructure projects and to feed humanity’s insatiable appetite for wood, tea, coffee, and rubber. Wildlife is trapped, shot, snared and poisoned till some species are just not seen any more.

The king cobra is arguably the most intelligent of all snakes. It is the largest venomous snake in the world, growing to over five metres in length. While its venom is not as toxic as the spectacled cobra’s, it makes up for it in quantity. It can inject 6 ml of venom in a single bite compared to a mere 2 ml of the much smaller spectacled cobra. King cobras may live for 30 years or more. Their sense of sight and smell are extraordinary and they generally slip away into the forest before any human even sees them. Not much is known about king cobra numbers in the wild, but the more we destroy our rainforests, the less space there is for a mighty predator.

 

In March the monsoon rains are still a few months away. I and my team of researchers at the Agumbe Rain-forest Research Station are often witness to what is aptly called a ‘combat dance’ by king cobras. The snakes are so keen on the fight that they pay no heed to us, watching nearby. This ritual wrestling match can last for an hour or more, only ending when one male obviously has the upper hand. With a show of dominance the larger male pins the loser down and raises high, hood distended, displaying the broad yellow bands. The vanquished snake hastily retreats after the match is over. It is dangerous for the defeated male to continue to hang around the stronger king cobra; he could become a meal as they are cannibalistic.

As I hike through the forest I revel in the sights and sounds of this, my favourite place on earth. I watch the flight of Draco, the brilliant flying lizard as it soars on bright orange wings between trees. I’m reminded of my childhood when I’d been entranced by depictions of those giant flying reptiles, pterodactyls. Higher up in the towering trees, whitemaned lion-tailed macaques, a critically endangered monkey, quietly feast on Cullenia and jackfruit and the forest air pulsates with cicada and bird calls. The forest is dry and the leaf litter crackles underfoot. Further along a grey langur catches sight of me and whoops an alarm call. The whole troop flees by leaping several metres across to the next tree. I mimic their alarm call but that doesn’t draw them any closer.

I carefully edge past an innocuous looking plant, which is a stinging nettle locally called ‘terror of elephants’ and recall the time when I accidentally brushed against it and suffered stings, chills and fever for days. As the sun is about to set, I reach a dry riverbed, tired and sweaty, and make camp. I start a fire going between two boulders to prepare a simple dinner.

 

Just then, a rustling of dry leaves makes me alert – a snake! I jump over a log in hot pursuit, heading the snake off. It is a gorgeous, darkly hued spectacled cobra, heavy with eggs, and using a stick I carefully hold the snake by the tail. The hooded snake rears up and hisses in defence. Spectacled cobras are often active at dusk and after nightfall here in the forest, perhaps to avoid the snake-eating king cobras that rule by day. I get a picture of its unusual hood marking which looks like a W and let it go.

A nine foot female king cobra on her recently constructed nest. Agumbe, Karnataka. Photos: Romulus Whitaker	A twelve foot male king cobra at Agumbe, Karnataka.

 

Back at the camp, the fire has died out and the dinner burnt. In the fading light, I say to hell with it, I’m too tired to start all over again. Instead I brew some tea and unwrap a packet of Parle glucose biscuits. Settling into my hammock, strung between two trees and off the damp ground, I munch my makeshift dinner and ruminate on all the threats faced by the forests of the Western Ghats. A big worry is that the steady encroachment into the rainforest will not leave enough space to support a big predatory snake. There is no such place as ‘deep in the jungle’ anymore. Human activity has been encroaching more and more into the pristine forest.

Of course one way to save these forests is to turn people onto the magic of fantastic creatures like the king cobra. People in the Malnad area of Karnataka already revere this snake by tradition which is a great start. By protecting the big chunks of forest that this large snake needs to survive you also protect thousands of life forms that are found only here, in the Western Ghats. This is the same argument that the tigerwalas used to set up India’s 50 tiger reserves. But both king cobras and tigers use human dominated landscapes too, so it’s not just pristine forest that needs protection. It’s people who need to be convinced and congratulated for their tolerance. And with these thoughts I drift off to sleep.

 

I wake up in the morning scratching my many tick bites from the day before. I dab calamine around my neck and under the waistband of my undies, but the urge to itch is great, even though it’s just going to get worse. Ticks are real torture now, in the dry season and I fondly remember the leeches during the rains, hell, they just take a little blood.

March is the mating season of the king cobra and it seems like a risky business. The big male is a snake-eater, and the smaller female may be in danger. But when the male is on the pheromone track of a female, his testosterone levels are peaking and it’s not food he’s thinking about. If the female is ready, mating is a tender act. If she needs persuasion, the male will caress, poke and even butt her repeatedly until she raises her tail to allow his hemipenis to enter. The courting and mating may last three hours. With diminishing and fragmented forests, it is getting more and more complicated for wild king cobras to find each other and they often have to cross through tea fields, plantations and even swim rivers and reservoirs to reach another chunk of forest.

A king cobra's mesmerizing stare. (Photo: Janaki Lenin)

Over the past decade and a half of study it is now clear that a courting pair of wild king cobras will stay together for days and even weeks after which the male king cobra will go his way perhaps in search of other females to mate with.

 

I come across fresh langur dung as I head back to our research station and scoop some of the pasty stuff up and stash it in a plastic bag. It’s the end of a long day and I head down to a pool in the river and strip down for a nice cool soak. Emerging from the river, I perch on a rock and bait a hook with a little ball of the langur crap and chuck the line into the deep end. I get a hit almost immediately – such is the eagerness of the carp for monkey poop! A local tribesman taught me this trick one day by showing me langurs feeding high up in trees over the stream and the carp swirling around in the water below for the droppings falling in the water. I scrape the crap from under my fingernails carefully before cleaning the fish on the riverbank and take it back to grill.

 

We’ve all heard that a king cobra can kill an elephant, but this what I’d call a typical encounter scenario: A king cobra is up in a tree. A lone elephant comes foraging by. His mobile trunk grabs the leaves of the palm tree close to the king cobra. To her the elephant trunk must look like a snake. The startled king cobra hoods up. The trunk doesn’t smell quite right and the elephant is getting closer and closer. The perceptive snake avoids an encounter by leaving her vantage point, gracefully sliding down in the bushes on the other side of the tree. The elephant hasn’t noticed and keeps feeding on the juicy palm leaves. I think it’s pretty unlikely that a king cobra would ever feel the need to bite an elephant.

Crawling slowly away she picks up a scent with her sensitive tongue – that of a ratsnake. She relentlessly tracks the snake down to a tree hollow where it has taken shelter. Without hesitation she grabs the ratsnake in mid-body, her jaws clamping down on the two metre long snake like a vice. Her venom is a potent cocktail of toxins causing paralysis and enzymes which break down body tissue. The rat snake retaliates by biting the king cobra but she does not let go until the smaller snake is paralyzed and ready to swallow. The whole thing is over 20 minutes later.

As the weeks pass by clouds build up into towering thunderheads. A light rain showers the forest as a preamble of what’s to come soon. The rising humidity causes frog calls to reach a deafening crescendo.

The time has come for the spectacled cobra to lay her 20 pearly white soft eggs. She seems to know that the best place is in the heart of a termite mound, where she will guard her clutch until they hatch. The termites regulate the temperature and humidity inside the mound creating the perfect incubation conditions for the eggs and will make the mother cobra’s life bearable over the two months that she is resigned to being with her eggs without food, without water.

Later, in May, rains arrive in earnest and the downpour lasts several days. In other parts of the Western Ghats it sends the elephants out of the thick-forested valleys up onto the open grasslands, away from the dreaded leeches. The Nilgiri tahr retire to their cliff top hangouts to avoid being taken by wild dog and black panthers. Mists swirl above the canopy and onto the grasslands making the elephants and their grazing partners gaur, the world’s largest wild cattle, seem like giant ghosts. Lots of little creatures escape the flooded forest floor and seek shelter in our field station bungalows. I routinely find frogs, centipedes, slugs, snails and an occasional snake sharing quarters with me.

 

I trudge through the dripping forest to see what new things have emerged with the rains. I equip myself with leech socks, cloth leggings which tuck into my shoes and smear some snuff powder mixed with petroleum jelly around my ankles to ward off the little suckers. I’m a wimp compared to my tribal friends who just scrape them off with their bush knives as they walk along. Just try not to stand still for too long or you get covered with them. As I walk I find many kinds of millipedes, beetles, tree crickets and katydids, orchids in bloom and a vast array of mushrooms and lichens. Scorpions emerge after dark and it’s a total delight to use a UV torch to see them glow in the dark! I find large tarantulas waiting to ambush prey at the mouth of their burrows in embankments.

 

I spend the morning searching along the stream that borders the Agumbe field station and return to the research station to find some villagers waiting for me. There’s a snake in one of the houses. It’s just a short walk to the village where the men point to a crack in the mud wall of a hut and say that’s where the snake has taken refuge. I think it could be a krait from the villagers’ description. The crack is narrow and I have a glimpse of shiny scales where the snake is hiding. There is no way for me to pull it out and the villagers insist that I bash the wall down to get the snake out. Soon the hut wall is in shambles and a beautiful black, glossy krait emerges, startled by the bright daylight. I bag the snake, am profusely thanked by the hut owner and I carry it off to the nearby forest to release it.

A king cobra spreads its hood to warn you – STAY BACK! (Photo: Romulus Whitaker)

Two months go by and in the termite mound the spectacled cobra is aroused from her half-asleep state by stirrings beneath her. Tiny heads, complete with fangs and venom poke up between her coils. Her vigilance has paid off. 20 miniature versions of herself have hatched into the world. The future of at least some of her progeny is secure and there are plenty of frogs and rats in rice fields to gorge on. In fact, as far as spectacled cobras are concerned, converting forests to agriculture, life can only get better!

I return to my research station at Agumbe where a training camp is teaching the basics of tree climbing. We know that king cobras are semi-arboreal and we want to explore the canopy. There have been very few studies in the tree canopy of the Western Ghats and we feel it is a crucial part of the king cobra’s realm.

While I’m getting familiar with the king cobra’s terrestrial world, I’ve never explored its kingdom in the sky. Thanks to Icon Films who made the BBC documentary ‘The King Cobra and I’, a team of tree climbing experts taught us the basics. After a day of practice I winch my way 30 metres up to the canopy. On my quiet way up I encounter a giant Malabar squirrel that flees, chattering in alarm, a pit viper coiled around an orchid perhaps lying in wait for the bat that cannot resist the flower’s alluring fragrance. It’s a whole new world up here. Rock bees, butterflies, beetles buzz, flutter and forage among the flowers.

 

In contrast to the claustrophobic dark cool forest below, up in the canopy the sun is brilliant. I set up camera traps for the night. In the midst of rigging up the gear I witness two adult male black-footed grey langurs having an altercation over the ripening fruits of a fishtail palm. Both of them get so involved in their squabble they don’t notice me, just 20 metres away, hanging there in my harness next to the tree trunk with my binoculars. It whets my appetite for more and that first night we get wonderful camera trap video clips of a brown palm civet hunting among the leafy branches and a slender loris which comes right up to the camera, curious about the infrared light perhaps.

Meanwhile, the female king cobra with her home range fortunately close to our research station and heavy with developing eggs, is about to perform the most remarkable feat a snake is capable of, for the king cobra is the only snake out of the over 3000 species in the world to make an elaborate nest. She chooses her nest site in a secluded bamboo thicket and every day spends hours sweeping up the long thin leaves into bundles that she actually transports with tightened body coils. It takes her a week to accumulate and pack down a suitable pile of leaves. She then forces her way into the mound and forms a hollow inside and lays her 30 or more leathery eggs.

 

The female king cobra will either spend the next two months lying on her eggs or in some cases leave them to their fate. There are plenty of egg predators like mongoose, wild boar, civets, monitor lizards and even other snakes, which would happily make a meal of them. But she has made a perfect incubation chamber and perhaps her lingering scent dissuades predators and her eggs will be safe. The only problem is, she had made her nest just 50 meters away from a farm house where a couple with their two children live.

Luckily the farmer is typical of the Agumbe people and has a reverence for king cobras. He knows about the ARRS research and conservation work and sends us word that there is a king cobra nest near his house. When we get there we carefully probe the mound with a thin bamboo pole and find that the female is no longer in attendance. This certainly makes life easier. We put a temperature probe into the egg chamber and tell the farmer that one of our research team guys will come every day to take the temperature reading and that we will put a plastic shield around the nest so when the babies hatch we can take them away to let them go into the jungle.

This pleases the farmer and his teenage daughter, Keerthi, who has been listening to us tells us that she’s a zoology student at college in the nearby town and would be happy to do the temperature readings every day. What a find this was, a perfect arrangement to have the local residents involved in king cobra research.

 

Seventy-five days later I get a call from Keerthi that the eggs are hatching and a few of the hatchling king cobras are visible. We arrive at the nest, now surrounded by a metre high plastic sheet buried a foot deep. Keerthi’s father and mother are doting parents. Looking up at the bamboo over the nest we immediately spy a couple of coils of baby king cobras. After the king cobras hatch they instinctively climb up the bamboo culms. It’s much safer from predators up there. The others must be around too and sure enough we spot two tiny heads peering out from the leaf litter around the nest. We let them hang out here for a few days until they shed their skins. This is when the first pangs of hunger will stir them into actively looking for prey and a good time for us to turn them loose in the landscape.

Three days later we return and gently bag the 23 hatchlings and let them all go next to a stream in the forest nearby. The arrival of the monsoon releases a myriad of frogs and insects, food for other baby snakes. This is the right time for baby kings to hatch, as tiny snake hunters they will find just what they need: baby snakes of other species.

And this is also when they are going to run into trouble. Most of them will be taken by predators. If just one of these tiny kings survives to adulthood, then the amazing nest building efforts of the female king cobra will have been worthwhile. The vulnerability of these brilliantly banded little snakes is just the beginning of their problems as pressures continue to reduce rainforest habitat in the Western Ghats. Think about it: These forests aren’t just the habitat of king cobras, my favourite snake, they are the source of most of the water we depend on, collected from the copious rains to form the major rivers of south India.

And just to update you all, Ajay Giri is the Field Director of the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station which is administered by the Madras Crocodile Bank/Centre for Herpetology. Ajay and his team are able, in these troubled COVID-19 times, thanks to our excellent rapport with local police and village authorities, to carry on the king cobra telemetry project and rescue king cobras when they get into people’s houses. We are presently radio tracking one female and two male king cobras in the Agumbe area. The project is generously supported by the Deshpande Foundation, Oracle Corporation and the King Cobra Conservancy (https://www.thekingcobra.org) to name just a few.

 

We are in touch with king cobra research and conservation efforts in Thailand, Borneo and other parts of India including the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh where king cobras are often killed. To educate people over there we encouraged the production of an educational film, interviewing the wonderfully tolerant people of Agumbe, ‘Living with the King’ by the Gaia Group (https://youtu.be/eQXwq MLclc4).You must see this exciting film, which has been dubbed in Telugu and is being shown widely in Andhra and Telengana. And if you want to see the Emmy award winning film ‘King Cobra’ we made for Nat Geo, way back in 1997 go to https://www.youtube. com/watch?v= VkEhBeLYhek