Thursday, July 05, 2007 So: This croc is not the shoes By Michelle P. So Caught in the Net
THERE'S nothing much to do or see in Siargao. Cloud 9 is dangerously beautiful, all right, but beyond the eye-feast of toned bodies of surfers, this place in eastern Mindanao induces languor. One can only plant enough mangroves in a day.
That’s why newly elected officials of Del Carmen, a town in Siargao, are thinking of enlivening their place by having ferocious Kibol back. These guys got some mad humor and a great sense of adventurism.
Kibol is a crocodile that left Siargao for Palawan in 1992. Kibol was not a vagabond; he didn’t leave the mangroves of Siargao like some young bored croc that had lost his way and crawled and swam his way out to the west. He had class; he rode the late House Speaker Ramon Mitra’s chopper in going to Palawan. Kibol didn’t show the pilot any sign of airsickness but he kept the pilot in mind, for some future need.
According to a report of Ben Serrano of Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro, Kibol had chomped on 20 people when he was still a habitue of Del Carmen. (But these 20 people could have been flying voters because no one in del Carmen knew them. Kibol could only have actually eaten two, but storytellers, like government bureaucrats, need to jack up the numbers to be listened to.)
Anyway, Kibol got his name from his attempt to chow down a fisherman who had the bad luck of catching a croc instead of a mulmul. The fisherman, as ferocious as his attacker, got his knife and sliced off the croc’s tail. Since it was only a knife to gut the fish and croc skin is too thick, it took the fisherman 48 years to sever the tail. The bleeding croc knew it was time to let go, to move on like Ruffa. He swam away, with only a stump of a tail, but kept the fisherman in mind.
The fisherman earned the right to name his croc attacker. He called it Kibol, meaning, it with the cropped tail. The tail? He probably cooked it in vinegar and chili ala inun-unang ikog sa buaya.
But Kibol didn’t only attack people; he gobbled pigs, chickens, dogs and fish so the fisherman wouldn’t have any to catch. He became a society menace. When Mitra, who ran a crocodile farm in Palawan, saw Kibol, he knew he had to have him. Kibol has been in Palawan for 15 years now.
And now, the town officials of Del Carmen want Kibol back. The move to bring him back is initiated by Rep. Francisco Matugas, Siargao’s ex-governor.
At the time he was taken away, Kibol had a length of 18 feet (excluding tail) and a girth of 2.6 feet. Serrano’s report does not state Kibol’s age and weight then but says it was considered the biggest crocodile in the country in that circa.
Matugas said Kibol will have his own sanctuary in the mangroves of Del Carmen. He will sponsor a bill to have the 4,000 hectares of mangroves in his town declared a protected area. Once this happens, Del Carmen can become an eco-tourism site, he said.
If Kibol is too old to be returned, the town can settle for Kibol’s siblings, Matugas said. (Crocs can live to 100 years, but by then, they would be toothless and barely moving their third eyelid.)
Saltwater crocodiles like Kibol are abundant in Del Carmen’s mangroves, Serrano’s report said. What?! I planted mangroves in Siargao two years back with Smart’s Jane Paredes and The Freeman’s Divine Ngujo and I could have suffered the fisherman’s fate. The only thing I had with me then was a seedling. I couldn’t even choke a croc with it.
Uneasy with this realization, I asked Smart’s Lourdes Bersalote-Gocotano where we planted the mangroves in Siargao. Dapa town, she said.
I checked the map. It’s a little far from Del Carmen.
