Living Alongside Crocodilians

Everything in this book reduces to one learnable discipline. Just one. Here it is in a single place, before you close the cover.

Crocodilians are ancient, magnificent, and genuinely dangerous. They hunt by ambush, they hide in almost no water at all, and you will not see them coming. After heavy rain, high water carries them across the whole landscape, into creeks and ditches and low ground that were dry a month before, so that no familiar swimming hole can be trusted from one season to the next. None of them. Anywhere in gator or crocodile country, nobody can honestly promise you that a body of natural water is empty, because it never reliably is.

The response is behavior. Not fear, and not vigilance alone. Stay out of natural water. Swim only in designated, signposted, managed places, and only when they are confirmed open. Keep well back from every edge. Obey every sign as absolute law. Take special care after rain, at dawn and dusk, and at known hotspots. Teach your children the unbreakable rule before they ever reach the water. Do these things, and an animal fully capable of killing you becomes one you can live beside for a lifetime without ever being tested by it.

And remember the larger story. Crocodilians are not the enemy of a safe world; they are part of a living one. They hold their ecosystems together, they carry the culture of some of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth, and their recovery from near-extinction is one of the finest things our species has ever chosen to do. As the dominant species, dominant by intelligence, and therefore responsible by intelligence, it is our job to find ways to coexist with the animals that were here before us. Steve Irwin spent his life proving it could be done with joy rather than dread. With joy. Being croc wise is how ordinary people take up that same work.

Respect the water. Respect the animal. Come home every time, and leave a world that still has crocodilians in it.