THE INDEPENDENT (London, UK) 21 June 07 Love at first bite: The Snake Man of South Africa (Tim Walker)
The last time he was bitten by a cobra, Austin J Stevens, otherwise known as the "Snake Man of South Africa", was in the middle of the Namib Desert, 80 miles from the nearest hospital. The incident, captured for posterity by an Animal Planet television crew, and now on YouTube for all to see, begins with Stevens tackling the animal in his typical style. A herpetologist and wildlife photographer turned TV star, he invites comparisons with the late Steve Irwin, though his on-camera style is more enthusiastic expert than overgrown schoolboy: he crouches before the fearsome-looking snake that he has just dragged from the undergrowth by its tail, darting quickly from side to side to keep the animal's attention and to avoid the inevitable attack. He looks good for his 57 years, blonde-maned, tanned and agile, despite the venomous snakebites that have come close to finishing him off more than once. But then the cobra strikes.
"He was a wily old cobra and I'd misjudged his reach," Stevens recalls. "When he lunged he caught my hand and cut me with one of his fangs, but we were both moving so fast that he didn't manage to actually inject. I had a vein punctured, so I had a 50:50 chance. If I'd been injected with venom into the vein, I was going to die within minutes. If he'd just cut the vein and the blood had squirted the venom out, then I had a fantastic chance of survival. That was the toss-up."
After a few anxious minutes, Stevens surmised he wasn't going to die there and then. He drove 50 miles to the hospital where the good news was confirmed. Then he drove back to yank the snake out of the brush and finish the scene. "I had to go back and finish the shoot - there was no question in my mind. It's what I do. I'm afraid it's in my personality."
Stevens found his first snake when he was 12, in the bush near his childhood home in Pretoria, "a little red-lipped herald, which is a mildly venomous snake that's harmless to humans. I brought it home very proudly to show my folks, but they weren't impressed, so they made me get rid of it."
His interest had been piqued, though, and soon he was embroiled in an ongoing conflict with his mother and father over his offbeat obsession. "I used to go up to the hills and dig through anthills and find little snakes, which I kept bringing home until my parents finally said, 'OK, you can keep one, as long as it's harmless'. My fascination grew until I had a room full of snakes and branched out into venomous snakes. When I was about 16 I had a collection of cages built into my room that were second to none."
Why, in the land of the Big Five, where the world's most spectacular wildlife roams, was it snakes that captured the young Austin's imagination? "It's difficult to explain," he says. "But there's something really spectacular about reptiles. The touch of a snake is not wet and slimy, it's smooth and shiny and it moves without any obvious way of moving. There are so many species, so many colour variations, so many different aspects to study that it just grabs you."
Stevens honed his snake-handling skills during the war in Angola in the mid-1970s, when he was posted there on national service with the South African Defence Force. "In the war-zone we encountered a lot of snakes. I'd be called upon to remove them from tents, machine-gun nests, sandbags. I came home with snakebites instead of bullet wounds."
That's something of an understatement. Stevens was bitten by a puff adder and had to be transported 300 miles through enemy territory before being airlifted to seek medical care. His first major snakebite put him in a coma for five days and saw him lose part of a finger, but in the meantime he had acquired a taste for the stage.
"I had been asked to demonstrate the animals and give lectures on them to my regiment," he explains. "I was in an Afrikaans regiment, and the Afrikaaners are strong believers in the Bible, and in the notion that the snake is the most evil of all things. It was quite a challenge to get through to them. But you find that when you introduce someone to snakes, and you actually let them touch them, it converts a lot of people."
Following the war, Stevens became fully qualified as a herpetologist and earned his stripes as a handler in snake parks in South Africa and Germany, giving daily lectures and demonstrations to crowds from all over the world. But he secured fame, and his "snake man" moniker, when he spent 107 days in 1986 living in a glass tank with 36 venomous snakes, breaking the world record for human/snake cohabitation. The stunt had a dual purpose: to prove that snakes were not aggressive animals, and to raise awareness of another species's plight - the gorillas under threat in central Africa.
Among Stevens' companions during the record attempt were puff adders, cobras, boomslangs and black mambas, some of the most feared species on earth. "Like all animals, different snakes have different personalities," he says. "For example, reticulated pythons are known to be bitey, whereas common brown mole snakes are very calm, and you can pick them up in the wild and they'll pay you no attention at all. When I lived with snakes in the cage, 18 of them were cobras, and they were the comics - each one had a different attitude and a different way of handling the situation. When you live with them and see how they behave in your presence 24 hours a day, you come to realise that they all have individual characters. I was astounded."
Of course, things did not go entirely to plan. The record attempt provoked a media frenzy, as Stevens and his colleagues had hoped, but by day 96 the snake man was somewhat tired of camera crews, reporters and photographers invading the little bedsit he shared with his reptilian roommates. Suffering from kidney problems and groggy with exhaustion, he had another brush with death. "National Enquirer was doing a photo shoot with me, and I was over-extending myself. I wasn't fully aware or capable, but they wanted the most dramatic pictures they could get. I posed with an Egyptian cobra and I got bitten right in front of them - so they got their picture."
Determined to break the record, Stevens was treated in the cage, even extending his planned 100-day ordeal a further seven days to make sure he was in a fit state to enjoy the party when he finally emerged. The stunt had the desired effect, and raised enough money to find a female gorilla for a park's solitary male and begin a breeding programme.
Such are the lengths that Stevens is willing to go to in the name of conservation. Much of his new book, The Last Snake Man, is devoted to Africa's warm-blooded wildlife and the well-known problems they face. But his beloved snakes are at risk as much as any other species.
"Snakes are under threat because of habitat destruction, which is the case for all wildlife. I raise awareness of that as much as I can; it's an important part of my TV series. When people build up areas, snakes can sometimes move into those areas in a way that other animals don't find so easy. But they get killed immediately if they're found. The 10 per cent of snakes in the world that are known to be dangerous to humans have brought condemnation to the entire reptile population. People adopt the attitude that every snake is dangerous, so they kill them. I want people to say, 'I saw this guy on TV, he said if you step one metre back the snake will go past you. You don't have to be in danger, and you don't have to kill it.'"
Despite his expertise, Stevens has found himself recovering from snakebites more than he might have liked, but he disputes the charge that he is accident-prone. "I've had a lot of damage done to my body through the years. The truth is that I do a lot of stuff, and so I stand a greater chance of something going wrong. You cross the street once a day and you're not likely to get hit by a car. But you cross that street 10 or 100 times a day, you've got a better chance."
As his book attests, Stevens has crossed that road plenty of times: in the wild, he has come face to face with giant anacondas, 18-foot Indian king cobras, and Komodo dragons. He has been caught in the middle of an elephant stampede; hidden submerged from a pride of hungry lions for two-and-a-half-hours in a freezing cold marsh; had his supper stolen by hyenas; been shot at, stabbed and, of course, bitten more than a few times.
"It's natural that you slip up somewhere and get damaged, hurt or possibly killed in the long run. But I don't think of it like that. It's what I enjoy. You won't find me sitting in an office every day. Forget it."
The Last Snake Man is published by Noir
Love at first bite: The Snake Man of South Africa