16 Anaconda

Anaconda del Municipio de Pedro Gomes. Mato Grosso, Brazil

As an agricultural extensionist in my Peace Corps assignment, I spent much time visiting farmers around the local county. This visit was one of the more interesting.

20-foot-long anaconda was killed in their pig pen in 1962. Photo by Rick Bein (Third from the left), 1965.

This anaconda (Eunectes murinus) (local name: Sucuri) skin is what remained of the great snake harvested by these Brazilian pioneer farmers who had settled in Mato Grosso (now Mato Grosso do Sul) in the late 1950s. This family migrated from the Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Sul to create a new life for themselves in the vast “unclaimed” wilderness of the headwaters of the Taquari River, 40 kilometers upstream from the renowned Pantanal swamp. All eight of their children had been born in Rio Grande do Sul, and now the grandchildren were native to Mato Grosso.

There was a clearing on the south bank of the Taquari River where they decided to build their homestead, not knowing how the clearing came to be in the first place. They began clearing forest land to grow upland rice to provide sustenance for the family. After successive crops, the land became infested with weeds. New land was cleared, and they introduced some exotic African grasses on the old weedy land. The Jaragua and Colonial grasses took over to form excellent pastures for the zebu cattle. On the following map, the farm is located just west of the town of Pedro Gomes in the top center.

Pedro Gomes town sits in the north-central part of the State of Mato Grosso do Sul. Free map from Maphill. 2011          Creative Commons Attribution Non-Derivative License (CC BY-ND). 0—————60 miles.

The family was terrified one morning when they came upon this 20-foot monster that had swallowed one of their pigs!  It was chaos as they battled the green anaconda (Eunectes murinus). The snake was unable to escape the pig pen because it now had a bulging belly with a pig inside, too large to pass through the fence rails. Of course, it could have passed over the top of the fence, but that had not occurred to the snake.

Fearfully, the family ganged up on the anaconda with spears and clubs as he was now fighting for his life.  It was too dangerous to get close.  After an hour of shooting at it with pistols and rifles, the snake was finally killed. The family was quite proud of themselves and was eager to tell their story.

The anaconda had been living in the river next to the original clearing by their home for many years before this fateful day. No one dreamed that the snake was living under the water. They tied their canoes, and the children collected water there. What they did not know was that the anaconda was harvesting the collard peccaries (Pecari tajacu) (wild pigs, locally called javelina) that came in large bands initially over one hundred, for their nightly drink at the river. The original clearing along the river had been beaten open by the peccary’s nightly pilgrimage. Once a week, the snake would reach out of the water, over the crowd of peccaries, hardly noticed, and pluck a peccary out of the bunch. Immediately, it submerged, constricting and drowning the javelina before swallowing it.  Meanwhile, the one peccary was hardly missed, and the horde returned like clockwork the following night. Thus, the domestic pig was not a major change in the snake’s diet. The skin of a peccary is being held in the first picture by me and the oldest son, dressed in a red shirt.

Collared Peccary (Pecari tajacu) by Smithsonian’s National Zoo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 2008

The peccaries were considered pests by the farmers because they were destructive and dangerous, as a large band of them could knock down a person and devour them in a few minutes. The peccaries disliked the structures that the humans had built on their trail and, at night, would break through the walls, wreaking havoc on the home. To remain safe, the family would sleep suspended above the floor in hammocks and shoot blindly with a shotgun onto the dirt floor, hoping to kill one of the pillaging pigs. Little by little, they eliminated the peccaries.

Meanwhile, the anaconda began to go hungry. Its next choice of food was critical. Fifty meters down the river, the farmers had built a domestic pig pen with a corner extending into the shallow water of the river. This avoided having to carry water to the pigs.  One evening, the anaconda decided that a pig would be a nice alternative to a peccary; after all, they were in the same family, even though a bit larger.

The farmers used most parts of the snake and had not found a use for the skin. The father offered it to me for the small price of ten dollars. I bought the twenty-footer and used it to show off to different audiences, including my university classes. After 50 years with the skin, someone offered to cure the hide and made it flexible enough to unroll in my classroom. However, rolling and unrolling the skin took its toll as scales would fall off. After I retired, I did not have many audiences to show the snake and decided to find a new home for it where it could be used for educational purposes. The White Pine Wilderness Academy for after-school children in Broad Ripple, Indianapolis, agreed to mount the skin permanently on a wall where people can view it.