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BALTIMORE SUN (Maryland) 09 October 07 Reality bites - Inside an Indonesian cave, Severna Park's Brady Barr, a TV show host, meets a python with a good grip (Rob Hiaasen)
Photo: National Geographic Channel's "Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr: Snake Bite" chronicles Barr's experience in the "Snake Palace." (National Geographic Channel)
Who hasn't this happened to? You're in a snake cave on an Indonesian island and up to your belly in liquefied bat guano (don't ask). A 7-foot reticulated python - the object of your smelly search - coils around your legs and you are sinking in this quicksand, and the python, not caring about your well being at all, bites you rather high on your right leg with his flesh-ripping teeth.
"Ahhhhhh! He's on me! He's bitten me! Where is his head??? Grab his head!!!!!"
Now that's reality TV.
And those are the words of Severna Park's Brady Barr, herpetologist and host of National Geographic Channel's Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr nature series. Barr, who has spent 15 years tracking crocodiles and other such hospitable reptiles, traveled to Indonesia this year to an area that locals call the "Snake Palace." Deep inside a roach-infested cave, Barr and his crew encountered a particularly shifty python. What ensued in all its mucky drama became the "Snake Bite" episode, which premieres at 10 p.m. Sunday on the National Geographic Channel.
The hype has been as big as the bite.
"I was so completely incapacitated by the pain," Barr wrote in an account posted on National Geographic Channel's Web site. "I was terrified that the snake was going to pull me off my feet with its coils around my legs and drag me underwater."
Who doesn't want to see that?
Did Barr ever catch the python? If not, did he have the nerve to return to that very cave and try again? Did Barr really suffer from a flesh-ripping bite?
"I am fine now," Barr said by phone in Severna Park a few days before tonight's scheduled appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
The point of the expedition, he said, was to determine if these pythons use caves to seek refuge from the heat or if they are capable of eating bats in the dark. If so, how? Barr, who has captured all 23 species of crocodiles, also wanted the novel challenge of capturing cave-dwelling pythons.
"To have a real capture in real time and in a cave - this horrific environment - and have a bite thrown in is unprecedented footage," Barr said.
Shooting the footage was Barr's regular cameraman, Eric Cochran. Both men have traveled the planet to find and study crocs, gators, snakes and other reptiles. They are accustomed to adverse working conditions, and the Snake Palace was anything but palatial. Barr's words, "fecal soup," accurately set the scene. And Cochran, also hip-deep in the stuff, filmed the scene.
"Ignorance is bliss in these expeditions," Cochran said, "but this was brutal."
In the beginning, all was comfy and safe in the cave. A few bats here and there, a river of roaches, a spitting cobra, that kind of thing. After capturing a smaller python (and forcing it to regurgitate two bats - there was that), Barr and his crew wanted bigger game. So, they descended deeper into this heart of darkness. "Big snake!! Big snake!!" Barr bellows, which sounds louder in a cave, naturally.
As the episode continues, a much larger python is seen coiled in a nook of the cave. Barr and his partner in science, Dr. Mark Auliya, attempt to extricate the snake. One grabs the tail. One loses the tail. Snake body wrapping itself around legs and shoulders. Snake suddenly swimming.
"The situation gets out of control real quick. Before you know it, we didn't know where the snake was," Cochran recalled.
The team later admitted to breaking the cardinal rule of snake hunting: They got the tail of the 7-foot python but not the head. On an educational note, if you are underwater in sinking bat guano and can't find a python's head, it might very well find you.
"Brady was the one dealt the unlucky blow," Cochran said.
The unlucky blow from the snake's "backward-curving fangs" can't be seen in the footage but certainly can be heard. Barr howls and nearly loses his balance, which might be a fate worse than getting bit. "I'm bleeding!" Barr screams. Many would pack it in at this point, but the man has a nature show to do.
They go back after the snake, finally find and hold his head, and bag him.
Limping outside the cave, Barr inspects his wounds. Cochran keeps filming. "I would never stop rolling - even if I had been bitten. I have to get the footage."
The gashes on Barr's upper right leg need attention. Pythons aren't venomous, but they don't need to be. The muck alone could kill Barr. "Good God, I'm going to die of some infection," he remembered thinking.
The python is released and any science lost with him. No time for measuring and inspecting him. Barr had to hoof it back two hours to his truck and then to a string of medical facilities, where viewers learn that applying alcohol to a fresh snake bite - while necessary - also looks excruciating. Barr eventually finds a "proper hospital," undergoes four weeks of anti-rabies treatment, and returns to work to finish unfinished business with a snake, a cave and bat guano. As usual, his cameraman was game.
"The bite is the bite," Cochran said, "but the fact we went back to the same spot two months later is the most memorable thing."
The crew was understandably skittish about revisiting the Snake Palace. But they do because they still needed to study pythons in this environment.
As Barr says, "there's a scientific reason for us putting our hands on animals. I have never captured an animal just for television."
Reality bites

NEW YORK TIMES (New York) 13 October 07 Catching Snakes, Releasing Screams (Mike Hale)
Brady Barr has been bitten before. As the star of “Dangerous Encounters With Brady Barr” and, before that, “Reptile Wild With Dr. Brady Barr,” both on the National Geographic Channel, he has taken one in the face from a boa constrictor and one in the leg from a gharial. (A gharial is what a crocodile would look like if it had Bob Hope’s snout.)
So the climactic moment of tomorrow’s episode of “Dangerous Encounters” — which has the informative subtitle “Snake Bite” — should be old hat for Dr. Barr. Still, it’s great television. And I don’t doubt that it’s real. I think I, too, would scream if I were bitten in the ... well, just below the ... O.K., in the upper rear thigh by a 12-foot reticulated python.
Not everything that comes before that moment is so great, or so real. As Dr. Barr and a fellow snake expert make their way through a spooky Indonesian cave, its walls papered with cockroaches and its floor covered by 10 inches of liquid bat guano, he turns to the camera and mutters: “I don’t know where Mark is, man. I’m all alone.” It’s a wonder the camera operator doesn’t smack him.
Why is Dr. Barr chasing pythons through clouds of ammonia? At the top of the show he announces, “I’m going to test a theory that could transform our understanding of these little-known giants,” something to do with cool caves and broiling tropical sun. Fine. But the point here — as our fearless snake hunters yell, “I see a python! I see a python!” and charge into the shadows — is clearly python wrangling for its own sake. Vince McMahon could sell it as World Snake Wrestling.
By the time Dr. Barr meets his Waterloo in the cave, so many snakes have suffered so many indignities — yanked out of their holes, stuffed into sacks, forced to throw up half-digested bats — that you may be rooting for the 12-foot python, who just wants to be left alone. That’s the problem with the whole post-Steve Irwin school of nature shows, in which the style employed by Marlin Perkins of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” has been set aside, and his sidekick Jim Fowler talks constantly while tackling the animals.
Dr. Barr has been in this game since the late 1990s, shortly after Mr. Irwin began his own television career, so you can’t accuse him of being a copycat, and with his Texas accent and face from a Farrelly brothers comedy, he’s likable enough — if a snake got loose in the frat house, I’d be glad to have him around.
And “Dangerous Encounters With Brady Barr: Snake Bite” did teach me one thing, besides the utter stupidity of wading through liquid bat guano to find a python: that thing my dad used to grab bottles off the high shelves when he got older? You can grab a cobra with it too.
Catching Snakes, Releasing Screams