Each day is different when you’re radio tracking cobras and working as a field assistant at the Sakaerat Biopshere Reserve, Thailand.
I’ve always been fascinated by snakes so much so that at the age of 13, I attended an outreach program for snakes in Surat. During the program I learnt how important snakes are to our ecosystem and how deeply they are misunderstood in Indian culture. It was around the same time, when I decided to enter this field and learn more about them. The journey was not easy. It took 4 years to convince my parents to let me work in this field, though I had already begun learning about and rescuing snakes few months after the outreach program.
After engineering, I also completed the Basic course of Herpetology from Bombay Natural History Society to enhance my knowledge in this field. I started exploring places like Agumbe, Amboli, Goa, Matheran etc. in search of snakes and frogs. In 2015, I became a project coordinator at Nature Club Surat, an NGO working on environment conservation education and research since 1985. This position gave me a chance to learn more about wildlife conservation. Soon, various projects such as deer breeding project, vulture conservation project, human-leopard conflict mitigation program, wetland conservation project and camera trapping also followed. However, my interest was in studying snakes. Finally, the day arrived when I was selected as a field assistant for the Sakaerat Najas Project in 2016
DREAM COME TRUE
Based at the Sakaerat Environmental Research Station within Sakaerat Biosphere Reserve in Thailand, Sakaerat Najas Project is a research project dedicated to advancing current scientific knowledge and conservation of true cobras, focussing on Indochinese Spitting Cobra (Naja siamensis) and Monocled Cobra (Naja kaouthia). The project aims to improve cohabitation and reduce human/snake conflicts by developing recommendations for the reserve’s rural communities. Radio telemetry is the main method used to understand spatial ecology of cobras.
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