Peter Pan had the right idea: Never grow old. The only really good thing about being old is that you’ve met a greater number of fascinating people. Here, since I’m old, just turned 61, I’d like to tell you about four truly fascinating people I met when I was your age, in fact 17. Two were Englishmen (one a very famous scientist, the other a very famous poacher), and the other two were Thai (one a very famous scientist, the other a little-known smuggler until I accidentally made him world-famous).

   All were in Bangkok that year, 1966, and without realizing it at the time, I played the pivotal role in the explosive feud that—

   But let me back up a bit, and then I’ll start at the beginning.

   I was in Thailand (1960-1967) because my father worked there, and at school I was the President of the Student Science Society and the Editor-in-Chief of The SSS Bulletin, a sort of Stone-Age version of your Young Scientists Journal. My interest was snakes. My collection eventually numbered 8,000 pickled specimens and a handful of live ones, including one that itself was a handful—a 4.3 m.-long (14 ft.) Burmese python. In the 1964 Science Fair, I’d won the Grand Prize for a snake project, and that same year had published my very first article, in the Southeast Asian edition of International Conservation magazine: “The Cobras of Thailand.” A copy of that issue happened to make its way to Africa.

   Now here’s the true story of those fascinating four men.

 

Clash of the Naturalist Titans of Thailand

   One was a Thai-Chinese mountain of a man with a booming laugh and, when pissed off, the fearsome visage of a Gulf of Siam pirate captain. The other was a scrawny little guy, with glasses, a Thai of Chinese descent, who was shy, reserved, and extremely polite, with a bear-trap mind and a rapier wit.

   They both loved animals. But they could not have had more different backgrounds and personalities. The big man was entirely uneducated, and ran his own little for-profit zoo, in the center of which was his house. The shorter man was a real scientist, with both earned and honorary doctorates, and he ran, in his home, his own little wildlife museum, which was free to the public. The one could barely read. The other was a much-published international authority on Thai animals, especially birds.

   They had hated each other for more than 40 years.

   And in 1966, when I was a 17-year-old ISB junior (International School Bangkok), I inadvertently threw a gallon of lighter fluid on their smoldering feud.

 

   Both of those animal-loving titans are mentioned in The Science Club, in Kim Pao Yu’s chapter: “There were always activities going on at the Science Club, but the most memorable ones were the field trips. These trips started out small—a visit to the Pasteur Institute and Snake Farm downtown, or a special viewing of the private specimen collection of birds belonging to Dr. Boonsong Lekagul, Thailand's leading ornithologist. Another time, we visited the crocodile farm of Y. Siah.”

   Dr. Boonsong was the real scientist with the glasses and the museum, Mr. Siah was the mountain of a man with the booming laugh and the zoo.

   On our first of several SSS field trips to Mr. Siah’s Bangkok Reptile Grove (3 July 1963), he proudly introduced us to his gigantic Thai crocodile, that had killed an old woman with one slam of its tail, showed us his huge king cobras, and let us all hold a big green-and-yellow one-horned chameleon from Africa. On our field trip to Dr. Boonsong’s in-home museum (16 August 1963), he gave us a little talk on conservation, and encouraged us all to build birdhouses.

   After that visit, Mr. Reeves paid for three subscriptions to the magazine published by the Association for the Conservation of Wildlife, which Dr. Boonsong had founded in 1952—one subscription each for ISB’s elementary, middle, and high schools.

   A decade after founding the ACW, Dr. Boonsong founded the Bird Conservation Society of Thailand (originally called the Bangkok Bird Club), and, most famously, that same year, 1962, he spearheaded the creation of Khao Yai National Park, Thailand’s very first one. Thailand has since created nearly 65 other national parks, all of them the legacy of Boonsong Lekagul, who today is remembered as “the Father of Conservation in Thailand,” and “Mr. Conservation.”

   Ann Ladd Ferencz recalls in Chapter 10 of The Science Club that, “Thailand was (and is) a Wonderland of life forms. It has flying snakes, for example, and flying lizards, and flying frogs; and it has squirrels the size of spaniels; and it has Calyptra eustrigata, the vampire moth, which uses its proboscis to suck blood from sleeping people.” Dr. Boonsong had a burning passion to share those and all the other many wonders of the kingdom’s incredible fauna with the general public, especially young people, and he knew the power of the printed word. His was a prodigious lifelong output of pamphlets and brochures, newspaper and magazine articles, and more than 30 books, especially Bird Guide of Thailand (1968), Mammals of Thailand (1977), and Field Guide to the Butterflies of Thailand (1977)—the last two co-authored, all three illustrated by Dr. Boonsong himself, since he was an excellent wildlife artist.

   He also wrote children’s books. The favorite book of Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn when she was 8 years old was My Life: A Baby Gaur. (Gaur: gigantic forest buffalo.) She explained, “It is a story of a baby gaur, who wanders in the wild and chats with other animals in the forest. The story helps us understand the nature of animals . . . Dr. Boonsong taught me how to use binoculars to spot birds. Whatever we saw, we’d look up in the birds guide book to learn their common and scientific names, as well as details about them” (The Bangkok Post, 8 February 2007).

   Dr. Boonsong Lekagul named a new species of bird, the white-eyed river martin, after HRH Princess Sirindhorn: Pseudochelidon sirintarae. He himself was honored in the names of new species discovered by other scientists: Iole propinqua lekhakuni (a bird), Opisthotropis boonsongi (snake), Megophrys lekaguli (frog), etc.

   And his friends included Joy Adamson (author of Born Free, about an African lion), S. Dillon Ripley (Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution), Russell Peterson (former Governor of Delaware, President of the National Audubon Society), and Salim Ali (who is mentioned in Chapter 3 of The Science Club: “Salim Ali, ‘the Birdman of India,’ was active in Ornithology right up until he died, 91 years old”).

   Dr. Boonsong earned doctorates in Forestry (Kasetsart University) and Science (Chulalongkorn University); but he was also a medical doctor (pre-med, Chulalongkorn University, 1927;
Siriraj Medical School, 1929; MD, Chulalongkorn University, 1933). In 1935, he founded Thailand’s first-ever “polyclinic,” with physicians of different specialties under one roof—Sahakarnpaed, on Charoen Krung Road in Bang Rak. Decades later, adjacent to the building that housed his home and museum (near the Oriental Hotel) was his clinic, in which he saw patients every afternoon, after a morning of writing about animals or painting illustrations for his books, or urging SSS members to build birdhouses.

   For all these reasons, Dr. Boonsong received acclaim throughout the kingdom and international recognition. The World Wildlife Fund USA gave him the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize (1979), and Prince Bernard of the Netherlands awarded him the Order of the Golden Ark (1980). More importantly, the Kingdom of Thailand named Boonsong Lekagul a Commander (Third Class) of the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant (1974), and later a Knight Commander (Second Class) of the Most Noble Order of the Crown of Thailand (1985).

   And Mr. Siah’s prizes or awards? None.

   World-famous friends? None.

   Service to humanity? None.

   Publications? None.

   In 1930, when Boonsong Lekagul was diligently studying to be a doctor, Y. Siah was studying diligently how to make money. He was a smuggler and poacher at heart, and a pretty good taxidermist. But what he loved most was live animals, especially reptiles, and that year, 1930, he opened his Bangkok Reptile Grove (at 30 Yen Akas Road). Pay just a few baht to see amazing cold-blooded creatures who want to kill you!

   He’d had no schooling at all, and was barely literate. I remember the intense concentration on his face as he wrote me a brief note, in block letters, to remind me to smuggle a baby American crocodile back for him when I returned from home leave. “You keep paper in pocket, so you don’t forget your poor Bangkok friend who has all crocodiles of the world except crocodile from tip of Florida, thank you.”

   The note (which I kept for 30+ years) said: “1 CROC OF FLARIDA KEYHOLES.”

   So they inhabited completely different worlds, those two titans of Thai wildlife, though they had sort of started out in the same place, down south. Born in Bangkok in 1910, Mr. Siah ran away from home when he was 6—that is, sailed away from home, having hidden inside a big water jar on the deck of a Chinese junk. The crew didn’t discover him until they reached Songkla (an incident I put in The Elephant Queen, my Thailand novel—the villain as a boy, stowing-away on a Chinese junk). By coincidence, Songkla was the birthplace of Boonsong Lekagul, on 15 December 1907. And for the 40-plus years before I met them, these two “Songkla boys,” inhabitants of such vastly different worlds in adulthood, had detested each other.

   A smoldering resentment that basically went nuclear in 1966, thanks to me—inadvertently!

 

Louis S.B. Leakey’s Son and the Iodine Affair

   He was known throughout Africa as “Iodine,” and he was a real character: C.J.P. Ionides. Born in England in 1901, the son of wealthy Greek parents, he had been raised to be a proper Englishman, but he was anything but. He always wore a sweat-stained slouch hat, a ratty sweater, and khaki pants that were tattered and torn, and he always, even in downtown Nairobi, walked around wearing pink swimming goggles, in case of spitting cobras, who aim for your eyes.

   In 1966, I’d long since read a book about him, Snake Man: The Story of C.J.P. Ionides (by Alan Wykes, 1961), and had just devoured his autobiography, Mambas and Man-Eaters (1966). So he was a legendary character to me. I knew that all over Africa, in cities, people talked about “the slightly eccentric chap” who caught even Gabon vipers and black mambas bare-handedly—the “snake bloke” who incidentally, in 1922, had founded there in Africa the world’s largest (by far) wildlife-protection park, the Selous Game Reserve.

   He was also famous in the cities for his own unique interpretations of “wildlife protection,” such as the time he grabbed a big stick and assaulted a small mob of men to protect a mamba they were trying to kill—never mind that, ten minutes earlier, the snake had fallen from the thatch ceiling of a hut into the midst of a drinking party and in frenzied seconds had bitten 14 men, 9 of whom had already died.

   And I knew that all over Africa, in villages, people talked about how Mzee Iodine (“respected old person”) would disappear into the jungle/forest/bush for months at a time, alone, carrying with him nothing but cloth sacks for holding the snakes he caught, and, strapped to his back, a hand-cranked gramophone, and his favorite records. Deep in the wilds of Tanganyika or Belgian Congo or Rhodesia each evening, he’d get a little fire going, grill a snake he didn’t want to keep, and listen to Classical music at ear-splitting volume. “Hyenas hate Beethoven,” he told me the night he had dinner at my house in Bangkok.

   All this happened a few years before I became fascinated by Cultural Anthropology. So I was merely curious, not impressed, when I got a letter from Kenya and it turned out to be from Jonathan H.E. Leakey, the younger son of prehistoric-man experts Louis S.B. and Mary Leakey, of Olduvai Gorge fame. Then my eyes shot wide when I reached the paragraph in his letter that said that he and C.J.P. Ionides wanted to come to Thailand to catch king cobras and would I be so kind as to help them. “We saw your article on ‘The Cobras of Thailand’ in International Conservation and wondered if you would advise us on the best time of year for catching kings.”

   Before writing back that very afternoon, I raced in a taxi over to Mr. Siah’s place to confirm May as the best time of year for collecting king cobras. He agreed, “Yes, May. Egg time. Easy to find, because they never leave their eggs.”

   When the two Kenyans arrived at Dom Muang International on 1 May (Iodine without his goggles, there being no spitting cobras in Thailand), my mom and I were there to greet them (since I couldn’t drive yet). We got them checked in at the recently opened and architecturally spectacular International Hotel, and helped them get written permission from the general manager to keep in their suite the live snakes they would be catching. Then we piled back in the car and Mom drove us across town so they could meet Mr. Siah.

   The three men liked each other immensely on sight, and we spent the rest of the afternoon there at the Bangkok Reptile Grove. Inches from her lidless eyes, through glass, Ionides had a staring match with a reared-high female king cobra who was three times longer than he was tall. He won. Meanwhile, Mr. Siah wanted to hear all about the snake farm at Lake Baringo where Jonathan produced antivenin for the bites of all the worst African species. I think it impressed him, Jonathan, that neither Mr. Siah nor I had the slightest interest in his world-famous parents, who only studied ancient apes.

   The next morning, on my recommendation that they definitely should meet him, Mom and I drove Jonathan and Ionides downtown to meet Dr. Boonsong. The three men shook hands, and stood around sharing pleasantries for about 20 minutes; and then Jonathan, getting a look from Ionides, expressed regret that they had to get back to their hotel, so we left.

   Dr. Boonsong would have had a very great deal to talk about with them. He certainly would have been interested to hear about the Leakey family’s work since 1931 at Olduvai, which has been called “the Cradle of Mankind”; and since he himself was “the Father of Khao Yai National Park” (which is 837 sq. mi.), he could have talked all day to Ionides, “the Father of the Selous Game Reserve” (which is 18,532 sq. mi.). But the chemistry just wasn’t there.

   Jonathan and Iodine wanted me to go with them on their expedition, but Dad said I couldn’t miss 3 weeks of school. So off they went, collecting from the 3rd to the 31st of May, mostly in South Thailand (Nakhon Si Thammarat), and when they flew back to Kenya, they had with them 16 live adult king cobras and 484 king cobra eggs. Plus they took home a slew of regular cobras, and assorted vipers, pit vipers, coral snakes, kraits, and rear-fanged snakes (the fangs in the back of the mouth).

   Before their departure from Bangkok, they wanted to make two special stops. First was to the Applied Scientific Research Corporation of Thailand (since 1979 called the Thailand Institute of Scientific and Technological Research), whose Australian director, Frank G. Nicholls, had helped with the logistics of the expedition. There at the ASRCT, which at that time housed the national specimen collections, Jonathan and Ionides presented, as a thank-you to Thailand, a pickled selection of various rare non-venomous snakes they’d collected down south (66 specimens of 23 species).

   Then, before heading out to the airport, they asked Mom and me to drive them way back into town so that they could thank Mr. Siah in person.

 

   My crime was to give an uneducated, unqualified, mere animal-lover, who could barely read, fame and international recognition that he had not earned and didn’t deserve.

   After Jonathan Leakey returned to his snake farm at Lake Baringo, he told his many friends, snake experts worldwide, and his parents’ friends, all about his fabulous Thailand trip, heaping praise on Mr. Siah.

   In 1968, the National Geographic Society did a big TV special on the world’s reptiles and amphibians. It aired on 3 December 1968. On that show, the two biggest of the big guns at that American institution—National Geographic Society President Melvin M. Payne and NGS Chairman and National Geographic Editor-in-Chief Melville Bell Grosvenor—thanked by name 12 individuals and institutions from around the world, for their assistance in the making of the program. The sixth named of the 12 was the Los Angeles Zoo, and the ninth named was the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. But the very first name they thanked, Number 1 on their acknowledgments list—and the only Asian—was: Y. Siah.

   Attendance figures at the Bangkok Reptile Grove skyrocketed. Korean travel agencies made Mr. Siah’s little zoo a must-see destination, on a par with Dusit Zoo, Thailand’s biggest and most popular zoo.

   Far worse was to come. The following year, 1969, Jonathan finally completed his very detailed scientific report on their king cobra-collecting expedition. It was published in Bangkok, in Thai and English, in the Journal of the National Research Council of Thailand (vol. 5, nos. 1-4, March/June/Sept./Dec. 1969), and Dr. Boonsong was slighted in the Acknowledgements:

   “In particular, we extend our sincere thanks to the following in Bangkok: Mr. P. Soderberg who gave us most valuable advice on suitable localities in which to collect and who also identified our entire collection at the end of the trip; Mr. Y. Siah, for his advice and for looking after some of the king cobra eggs for us after our return to Kenya, until these hatched; Mr. Nicholls, Special Governor of the Applied Scientific Research Corporation of Thailand, together with members of his staff, who took care of much of the official paperwork of the trip on our behalf; also Mr. and Mrs. R. Soderberg and Dr. Boonsong Lekagul.”

 

   In 1973, after my years in Afghanistan as a Peace Corps Volunteer, en route back to Arizona, I stopped in Bangkok for a few days and tried to see old friends. The Reptile Grove was still open, being run by his sons, but Mr. Siah had passed away. When I dropped by Dr. Boonsong’s home-museum to say hi, he was too busy to see me.

 

   Because Dr. Boonsong had published both scientific and general-interest works and was a wildlife artist, he was my role model for my mind. But Mr. Siah was the role model for my heart. I remember thinking that Dr. Boonsong was much like George Washington—reserved, polite, stern, a true leader, a national exemplar—while Mr. Siah was more like Ben Franklin, who was basically a roly-poly prankster and, especially in Paris, a party-loving, tree-hugging skirt-chaser.

   Dr. Boonsong was a true gentleman and a distinguished scholar, a great scientist and a greater educator, and for his lifelong crusade on behalf of Thailand’s natural world, he richly deserves the title that now wreathes his name, “Father of Conservation in Thailand.” But even in the early years (1961-1966), when I spent many hundreds of hours doing research in his museum library, I never even shared a cup of tea with him.

   The night before Jonathan and Iodine headed south to Nakhon Si Thammarat to start their expedition, they and Mr. Siah came to our house on Soi 38, off Sukhumvit, for dinner. Mom fixed fried chicken. We all laughed when Ionides took a first small bite, frowned thoughtfully, then said, “Tastes like black mamba.”

   During dinner he told us things that few people knew about him—that his initials stood for Constantine John Philip, and that at age 16 he’d been expelled from the elite Rugby School for pheasant theft. Accepting seconds of Mom’s fried chicken, he told us, “I was completely innocent until they found the dead pheasants under my bed and two loaded revolvers in my desk.” His father’s connections then got him into Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy. “I’m proud to say that in a class of 155, I graduated 153rd.”

   Mr. Siah then shared his adventure at age 6, stowing away on the Chinese junk, after which he turned to me and prompted, “Tell them about your stowaway baby crocodile.” So I told the two grinning Kenyans about going to a big pet store in Hermosa Beach, one that specialized in reptiles, the night before we had to head over to Los Angeles International to board the flight back to Bangkok. There I bought not only a baby American crocodile, but also these other squiggly babies, as surprise presents for the Bangkok Reptile Grove: a sidewinder rattlesnake and a western diamondback from Arizona, a water moccasin from Louisiana, a copperhead from Arkansas, a scarlet king snake from Colorado, a spectacular corn snake from Florida, a box turtle from Maryland, and a horny toad from New Mexico. (They all had to be babies, to fit in my blue Pan Am bag, which I had to carry with me, the luggage deck being far too cold for cold-blooded creatures.)

   I also told them about my two hours of terror on the tarmac in Honolulu. While everyone else got off the plane to stretch their legs during the layover, I stayed nervously in my seat, dreading the attention of any stewardess, having signed, like everyone else, the little Customs card declaring that I was not bringing into Hawaii any forbidden fruits or vegetables, or, worst of all, snakes. (Like Ireland, Hawaii is snake-less.) My Pan Am bag filled with highly illegal living contraband, tucked under my seat, didn’t happen to lurch or hiss while any stew was within earshot.

   “To knowledge through stealth!” Ionides toasted with his iced tea, and later that night I wrote down the exact words he said next: “Coming from an admitted poacher, this may sound like one of your Chicago gangsters saying that what he really wanted was to be a cop, but I went into poaching in order to gain experience as a naturalist.”

   After apple pie, we all trooped out into our side yard, with a flashlight, to the big wood and wire enclosure that I’d built for Sam. Sam was the Burmese rock python that Mr. Siah had given me 5 years earlier as a day-old hatchling only 45 cm. long (18 in.), and that in 1966 was 4.5 m. long (14.8 ft.).

   For a long moment, C.J.P. Ionides peered down at the 90.7-kg. (200-lb.) snake. Then he said to me, “Frightfully sorry, but your Sam needs a new name, I suggest Samantha, being female.”

   Mr. Siah and I scoffed in unison. “He’s a male!”

   After I graduated from ISB, just before flying off to start college here in Arizona, I gave Sam back to Mr. Siah, who promised to give him a good home, a huge glass enclosure with plenty of room for him to grow another few meters, and with other rock pythons to play with. Seven months later, an envelope from Bangkok arrived in Phoenix, my name and address in block letters. Inside was a Polaroid of my pet in the big glass enclosure. On the toothpaste-green sign that identified the occupant, the name “SAM” in black letters had been crossed out, and beneath it, in big red letters, was “SAMANTHA SODERBERG,” and beneath that sign was the python herself, happily coiled atop 64 eggs.

   When I stopped by on my return from Afghanistan and said hi to her, she was 5.5 m. long (18 ft.).

 

   Shortly before he passed away on 9 February 1992, Dr. Boonsong told a journalist, “Our real dilemma in wildlife conservation is to try to reconcile it with economic development.” That’s absolutely true, and he certainly served as a trailblazer for the ultimate solution to that dilemma. But it seems to me that maybe the ultimate secret for wildlife conservation is to reconcile itself with its own extremes, which were embodied by those two titans.

   Dr. Boonsong was museums, Mr. Siah was zoos. Dr. B. was the pungent smells of mothballs and formaldehyde, Mr. S. was the intense smells of snake droppings and raw meat tossed for food. Dr. B. was professional careers, Mr. S. was hobbies. Dr. B. was scientific names in italics, Mr. S. was nicknames in block letters. Dr. Boonsong was Science, Mr. Siah was everyone else who loves animals.