A Field Day

Each day is different when you’re radio tracking cobras and working as a field assistant at the Sakaerat Biopshere Reserve, Thailand.

- Krunal Trivedi

I’ve always been fascinated by snakes so much so that at the age of 13, I attended an outreach program for snakes in Surat. During the program I learnt how important snakes are to our ecosystem and how deeply they are misunderstood in Indian culture. It was around the same time, when I decided to enter this field and learn more about them. The journey was not easy. It took 4 years to convince my parents to let me work in this field, though I had already begun learning about and rescuing snakes few months after the outreach program.

After engineering, I also completed the Basic course of Herpetology from Bombay Natural History Society to enhance my knowledge in this field. I started exploring places like Agumbe, Amboli, Goa, Matheran etc. in search of snakes and frogs. In 2015, I became a project coordinator at Nature Club Surat, an NGO working on environment conservation education and research since 1985. This position gave me a chance to learn more about wildlife conservation. Soon, various projects such as deer breeding project, vulture conservation project, human-leopard conflict mitigation program, wetland conservation project and camera trapping also followed. However, my interest was in studying snakes. Finally, the day arrived when I was selected as a field assistant for the Sakaerat Najas Project in 2016

DREAM COME TRUE

Based at the Sakaerat Environmental Research Station within Sakaerat Biosphere Reserve in Thailand, Sakaerat Najas Project is a research project dedicated to advancing current scientific knowledge and conservation of true cobras, focussing on Indochinese Spitting Cobra (