After While Crocodile

My what big eyes you have...not to mention a leafy tail. A leaf-tailed gecko taking a peek back at the kids.

Sept. 29, 2010 text and photos by Chad Lebo

A crocodile farm is a lot like a dairy farm except the animals can quite quickly separate your arm from your body if you try to milk them. Actually, the Croc Farm in Ivato is as much a private zoo as well as a pond-specked farm for 1,000 pound prehistoric carnivorous reptiles. It has some birds, burros, rabbits, turtles, fosa, and even some lemurs. 

And some lucky kids got to see them all a few weeks ago. The field trip was a gift from a visiting donor as was the surprise ice cream stop on the way back. And the only cost to the kids was that they had to endure a science dweeb who insisted on telling them obscure fact after obscure fact at each pond or cage.

Yes, it's called Croc Farm, but that doesn't mean lemurs aren't allowed too.

But can you really blame me? (Yes, I am the science dweeb.) Who wouldn't want to know that the cave-dwelling Nile crocodiles of Madagascar only eat about once a year? Or all the sorted details of the greater vasa parrots' sex life?

Regardless, a fine time was had by all. And no one was too bored by all the blabbing. At least no one tried to toss the talkative science teacher into the pond. At which point I would have been torn to pieces and ground up to a nice digestible goo by the stones (also called gastroliths) in the crocodile's first, and very muscular, of its two stomachs. 

See what the kids had to put up with?

A few lazy crocodiles. Well, they haven't really evolved in 200 million years. Just saying. 

Some Akany kids after enduring me giving mini science lectures at every stop.

Baby got back...er, baby on back.