BROWNSVILLE — Two things reptile enthusiast Karel Fortyn neglected to plan for when he smuggled two baby Orinoco crocodiles from Venezuela to Canada in 1986, by some accounts in a thermos.
One, that the extremely rare crocs would continue to grow in the incubator-like conditions he kept them in. And grow. Too large for any fishbowl, tub or other enclosure at his Welland, Ontario, serpentarium, so Fortyn eventually had to build a basement tank with a partition so the territory-starved male of the pair didn't kill the female.
And two, that he would die unexpectedly, launching a custody mess for hundreds of creatures he kept in his reptile zoo, including crocs Blade and Suede, two members of a critically endangered species Venezuela didn't want and northern zoos couldn't handle.
Enter Brownsville's Gladys Porter Zoo, which took on reams of paperwork to get past international endangered species guidelines and U.S. Customs and Border Protection port regulations to claim the 14-foot, 800-pound male, Blade, and the 11-foot, 400-pound female, Suede.
This weekend, zoo staffers traveled to Ontario with crocodile experts to extract the crocs from their prison-like tank and transport them to the tip of Texas in box trucks, anxious to avoid injuring them.
They arrived Wednesday, and used a crane to transfer the crates containing the crocs from a flatbed trailer to a new home designed just for them.
It took eight zoo staffers to secure the crates to the crane, another eight to meet them. Zoo Curator Colette H. Adams perched on the edge of the grotto, guiding the effort, then used a stick of bamboo to poke the giants out of their boxes.
A small crowd of onlookers cheered and applauded as Suede, and then Blade, emerged into a new world of fresh air and, though filtered by canopies, sunshine. Suede basked on her little shore, Blade slid right into the water. Both seemed to sport wide, toothy, crocodile grins.
“It's a pretty big deal. These are very rare crocodiles, very rare,” said Emma Mitchell, part of the zoo's education team. “I'm excited for the crocs. They get a beautiful place to live. I'm very excited for the species, and the zoo.”
Orinoco crocodiles are native to Venezuela and Colombia, but were all but wiped out because of their prized hides. Some estimate the wild population dipped to as few as 250 adults in the early 1990s. Stiff international protections and breeding efforts in their native South America have brought their total above 1,500, but they are still considered the most endangered New World crocodilian.
Blade and Suede's eventual offspring, if released in the wild, could prove a welcome addition to the gene pool.
Fortyn, who died of a stroke in May at age 52, did plan to build something larger, but fate got in the way, Adams said.
News clips from Canada detail the courtroom melodrama that went on between his former common-law wife, fiancée and brother, a Czech Republic resident who was finally given the legal right to make decisions about most of the reptiles. Most went to area zoos, but there was a quandary concerning the crocodiles.
An Internet petition to “Save the Orinoco Crocs of Seaway Serpentarium” garnered 271 signatures from all over the world.
“They were in a pen, 14 feet deep and 10 feet wide, divided in half,” Adams said. “They were indoors; they'd never to the best of my knowledge since the mid-1990s seen the sun. Their water was kept at approximately 80 degrees, and they did have a landing they could crawl out on. Though I never saw them crawl out on the landing.”
Suddenly, Adams breaks off in excitement to see Suede, who'd been in a box for days, move toward the water in the new 35-by-30-foot grotto.
“She's moving! She's moving!” she exclaimed.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Happy-day-for-crocs-in-tri-national-saga-2227000.php#ixzz1kVhxdvvE
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