Sunday May 16, 2010

This morning as I was walking across the street to the internet café to check my email, a small group of people, three little boys holding pieces of wood and two men, were standing on the edge of the road. When I looked down, I noticed that they were all standing around caiman, which at first I thought was alive, but which had clearly been beaten over the head. The men explained that the boys had killed it when they found it down in the trench by my house, the trench I’ve repeatedly had to stand on the edge of to fix our water pipe. I asked the boys if I could take their picture with it. They were standing at a cautious distance from the dead caiman and only hesitantly shuffled a few inches closer before doing their best tough-guy poses. I showed the boys the pictures I had taken, the smallest peeping timidly at the camera screen. It was difficult to see the picture in the sunlight.

The caiman was about five feet long with a dark gray-brown back and tan belly. Though its legs were short and squat, it was clear that its muscular tail had been very powerful. I asked the men what they were going to do with the dead animal. One of them rolled it onto its back with his foot and jiggled its stomach with his toe. He said that most of the caiman would not be used for anything, but that people would eat parts of it “from here to here,” he said, indicating with his foot an area just behind its hind legs to the tip of the tail.

The men warned me to stay out of the trench from now on. I told them not to worry and left to check my email. On my way home, the creature was still on its back on the side of the road, but no one was standing near it anymore. I stopped to get a better look and noticed that someone had stuck a stick in its cloaca. I thought this was a rather undignified way to treat it, but I did not remove the stick. Someone was shouting at me from a distance, offering me some of the meat, which I declined. A short while later, someone went out and dragged the caiman away, probably to butcher it.

A few weeks ago a 9-foot-long caiman was caught in a village outside of New Amsterdam, right next to Bohemia Primary School. I heard about it through a teacher at BHS, whose yard it was found in. She said the meat had been used to make a curry and that caiman tastes a bit like chicken, but tougher. Finding an animal like that is not too common around here, so it seems to create a bit of a stir. I will probably hear about this one on Monday at work.

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Today I noticed that no one had, in fact, butchered the caiman. The (attempted) disposal method was to burn the body on the side of the road. It smells terrible. Still, the biologist side of me wants to go over and visually dissect it. I'm sad they had to kill the caiman, but it makes sense for a lot of reasons--the major one being safety. It's not as if there are animal control officers around here who could have released it into a better habitat.

In other news, there is a bird family which has taken up residence in the wall of one of my classrooms. Here is the baby sleeping (finally). It likes to interrupt.