‘It was natural that I started learning about nature just hands-on’: Romulus Whitaker, herpetologist | Eye News,The Indian Express
The conservationist who founded the Madras Snake Park and the Madras Crocodile Bank, on learning from his mother and the great outdoors
Monday, Sep 05, 2022
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HomeEye'It was natural that I started learning about nature just hands-on': Romulus Whitaker, herpetologist
‘It was natural that I started learning about nature just hands-on’: Romulus Whitaker, herpetologist
The conservationist who founded the Madras Snake Park and the Madras Crocodile Bank, on learning from his mother and the great outdoors
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Updated: September 5, 2022 12:13:18 pm
Rom with Sumantran spitting cobra, 2017 (Photo: Md. Silmi)My mother was a single mother. She had divorced my father and raised me and my older sister in northern New York state, out in the country. We lived in what could be called a mansion because my mother’s eldest sister was a rather successful commercial artist in New York City, and she bought this piece of 40 acres of land with a house, which was built in 1813. It was a 22-room house and she was very happy that we would spend time there and look after it.
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For me, as a six-year-old kid, it was paradise because, number one, I didn’t have to go to school. And number two, it was surrounded by woods, streams and plenty of snakes, no venomous ones, my mother quickly established that. I guess that’s why she was so promotional about what I was doing, catching snakes and bringing them home. She got an old aquarium– which is now called a terrarium. It was an old broken one that couldn’t hold water anymore, but she landscaped it with few rocks, moss and grass and we would keep garter snakes and other local snakes that I caught, in it for a few days and then release it. It was a very good start for me.
It was just natural that I started learning about nature just hands-on. I was too young to be able to read at that stage but later on, my mother got me something called The Boy’s Book of Snakes, which was one of those kids’ books with nice illustrations. I learned as much as I could from that, and I probably became a very obnoxious teacher of adults. I would ask adults why they hated them. Most of them were non-venomous and they were beautiful. They would say, ‘Beautiful, are you kidding, kid?’ I really must have been obnoxious in looking back because I was just so vehement about how wonderful they were.
My formal education was very sketchy–I barely finished high school. When we moved to India, I studied at what is now Kodaikanal International School. I think they graduated me to just get rid of me. I then got into the University of Wyoming. I chose Wyoming because it had a course in wildlife management, which, at age of 16, when I graduated from high school, is what I thought I would do for the rest of my life. And the second thing is the state advertised that it has more deer than people and I said, ‘wow, that’s the state for me’. I’m kind of reluctant to say it now but I loved going hunting in those days. I have changed quite a bit .
Rating: 5