The Experts Behind This Book

The seal on the cover of this book is not decoration. Croc & Gator Wise carries the Citadel Culebra expert certification because it is built on a combined lifetime of real, hands-on work with crocodilians and the reptiles that share their world. Not internet lore. Here are the people behind it.

First, a word on who “we” are. Citadel Culebra is an online reptile academy. A school. We bring together some of the most experienced reptile and crocodilian people in the country, and in a few cases the world, to teach the craft the way it should be taught: how these animals actually live, how to keep and care for them properly, and how to read the wild world they come from. It is built for everyone, the person holding their first gecko and the keeper who has been at it for thirty years, and we grant real credentials to the people who put in the work.

The reason a school like this exists comes straight from Steve Irwin. The way you save an animal is to get people to understand it, and the way you get people to understand it is to teach them. Education is conservation. Our aim is to empower the reptile community, and the wider world along with it, to organize it, and to hand people the knowledge to respect these animals instead of fearing them. A field-safety guide like this one is that mission in your hands: learn the animal, and you protect yourself and the animal at the same time.

Tom Crutchfield

Tom Crutchfield is one of the most influential figures in the history of American reptile keeping. Six decades of it. Across those decades he has bred sturdy, difficult animals that most people only ever hope to see behind glass. He pioneered the captive breeding of rare and endangered species and built a body of practical knowledge that no institution could have produced. His work with iguanas alone is legendary: the celebrated “Crutchfield” rhino iguana lines, the Cyclura rock iguanas (Lewis’s iguanas among them) and the hybrids and color projects that followed, including the famous “Crutchfield Crimson” line. The first albino Burmese python ever brought into the United States came through Tom; Bob Clark would go on to be the first to breed it. He has worked hands-on with some of the most demanding animals alive: eight-foot crocodile monitors, cobras and other venomous snakes, and trained others to handle them safely, from members of Miami’s Venom One response unit to a long list of keepers and experts who went on to shape the reptile and crocodilian world in their own right. In sixty years he was never seriously bitten. He never relied on force, only on understanding.

His crocodilian experience runs just as deep, which is the half of his life’s work this book leans on hardest. Tom has kept and worked nearly every kind of crocodilian there is, from Nile and saltwater crocodiles to American crocodiles and countless American alligators, handling them hands-on, day after day, across decades. Among them were critically endangered Cuban crocodiles that he brought all the way to hand-feeding through patience and an almost uncanny ability to read an animal; some of those very crocodiles live on today at Gatorland, one of America’s oldest reptile attractions. Go see them. When Tom Crutchfield says an animal is dangerous, or that a certain habit will get you killed, stop and listen. That authority is the foundation this book is built on.

Kevin McCurley

Kevin McCurley is the founder of New England Reptile Distributors (NERD) in Plaistow, New Hampshire, and the Chief Academic Officer of Citadel Culebra. Most of the reptile world knows him for ball pythons: across more than twenty-five years he imported and produced many of the morphs the hobby now treats as standard, and he literally wrote the book on the species. His animal room never stopped at snakes. Not close. Kevin has kept and handled alligators for years at NERD, a working reptile facility in New England, which is about the last place you'd expect to meet a gator. His crocodilian experience runs from hatchlings to wild adults to standing beside some of the largest Nile crocodiles on earth. He teaches the way this book teaches: read the animal in front of you, respect what it can do, and never mistake calm for safe.

Stacey Crutchfield

Stacey Crutchfield is a behavioral specialist and Tom’s partner in a lifetime of work with reptiles. Her gift is reading animals: the body language, the eyes, the subtle “weather” in a creature’s face that tells an experienced keeper whether it is calm, curious, or about to strike. She has built quiet, patient trust across the full range of them: from large, dangerous lizards like crocodile monitors and rhinoceros iguanas, to venomous snakes like cobras and vipers, to crocodilians of many kinds, including the alligators she has kept over her decades in this community. She carries a conviction that runs through every page of this book: that there is far more to these animals than most people ever see. They are intelligent, capable creatures that deserve to be understood and respected, and even appreciated for what they can do, rather than only feared. Fear has its place. These animals can absolutely cause harm. But respect and understanding are what actually keep both people and the animals safe. That is the spirit of every page here.

Braxton Warren

Braxton Warren is the knowledge architect behind Citadel Culebra and behind this book. He has kept a wide range of reptiles across more than twenty years, from turtles and geckos to two-hundred-pound reticulated pythons and hundred-pound water monitors. The crocodilians came earlier. He has studied them for as long as he can remember, since he was a child, learning everything he could about them and seeking out some of the most experienced crocodilian people in the world to learn from directly. His role here is that of the architect: to draw the hard-won, often unwritten knowledge out of master keepers like Tom and Stacey, add his own years of study and findings, and build it, together with the science and the hard lessons of real tragedies, into something clear, ordered, and genuinely useful to everyone. It is his work that turns a lifetime of collective expertise into the book in your hands.

That combination of real keepers with nothing left to prove and a careful architect determined to get it right is what that certification stands for. It is why you can trust what follows.